HammerBar - A Windows-Like Taskbar for MacOS

HammerBar is a "Spoon" for HammerSpoon that displays a clickable taskbar along the bottom of your screen and includes support for multiple monitors. It can show buttons for custom app lists or individual apps and can also show a digital clock.

It's not perfect, has some known bugs, but it's been my daily driver for the past year and I think other people may find it useful.

Getting Started

install Hammerspoon
create the directory ~/.hammerspoon/Spoons/HammerBar.spoon/
copy appMenuButton.png and init.lua (from https://github.com/glenreesor/HammerBar/releases/tag/v0.9) to ~/.hammerspoon/Spoons/HammerBar.spoon/

add the following lines to ~/.Hammerspoon/init.lua:

hs.loadSpoon("HammerBar")
spoon.HammerBar:start()

set your Dock to autohide, otherwise the HammerBar taskbar will be above the dock.
restart Hammerspoon

You should now have a basic taskbar. See below for more configuration options.

Quirks

I don't know the cause of these -- they're either bugs in my code or Hammerspoon, but I haven't tracked them down yet :-).

some apps don't show up in the taskbar until they're explicitly focused (like Firefox)
sometimes when adding a monitor, no taskbar will appear on it
sometimes you need to restart Hammerspoon after your Mac sleeps in order for the taskbar(s) to be displayed properly

Configuration

The following can be added to ~/.hammerspoon/init.lua to enable more HammerBar features. Add these lines before spoon.HammerBar:start().

Add a Launchpad Button

spoon.HammerBar:addLaunchpadLauncher()

Add an App Menu Button

You can add any number of buttons to show application menus by calling addAppMenu() with a table of tables containing bundleId and displayName for the apps you want.

For example, the following will add an app menu that shows Safari, Firefox, and Chrome:

spoon.HammerBar:addAppMenu({
  {
    bundleId = 'com.apple.Safari',
    displayName = 'Safari',
  },
  {
    bundleId = 'org.mozilla.firefox',
    displayName = 'Firefox',
  },
  {
    bundleId = 'com.google.Chrome',
    displayName = 'Chrome',
  },
})

If you don't know the bundleId for the app you want to add, open the Hammerspoon console, start the app normally, then Shift-Click on the app's button in the HammerBar taskbar. Debugging information, including the bundleId, will be printed to the Hammerspoon console.

Add an App Launcher Button

Call spoon.HammerBar:addAppLauncher() with the bundle ID for the app you want. For example, the following will add a button for Apple's text editor:

spoon.HammerBar:addAppLauncher('com.apple.TextEdit')

Add a Clock

spoon.HammerBar:addClock()

Keybindings

Command + Control + Up: Vertically maximize the currently focused window
When clicking on an app window button in the taskbar:
- Shift: Print window info to the Hammerspoon console. Use this to get the bundleId if you want to add the app to an App Menu
- Command or Control: Focus / raise the window instead of minimizing / maximizing
When clicking on an app in an App Menu:
- Command or Control: Don't hide the menu after launching the app

dptr / HammerBar