Preface to the early release

What you are reading is an early release of this book, which means its contents is not yet complete, and you may find errors or omissions in it. Still, I hope you find it useful. I would very much appreciate your feedback! Please let me know what you liked, what you didn’t like, and what additional topics you would like me to cover. Please send me a message through Leanpub’s Email the Author page and let me know what you think.

Release notes

August 2020

This release includes the initial version of a brand new chapter, Hammerspoon Cookbook, Tips and Tricks, which contains practical examples of doing interesting and useful things with Hammerspoon, as well as some tips to improve your configuration.

Also included are multiple other fixes, clarifications and minor improvements.

Enjoy!

December 2019

This release includes a few typo fixes, and also a new section Conventions Used in This Book, describing what those icons you see next to some of the paragraphs mean. All of these were reported by readers - thank you, please keep the feedback coming!

November 2019

The Black Friday release includes the following changes. I hope you like it!

• Updated code for the Leanpub spoon to use asynchronous HTTP requests. This shows some of the more advanced features of the hs.http module, and addresses a real performance issue I encountered while using the spoon.
• A brand-new chapter: Exploring the Hammerspoon API, which presents an overview of some of the most important libraries and their functions, organized by topics. This chapter is still in progress, and I would very much welcome your feedback about it.
• A few other miscellanous fixed and updates.

August 2019

This is the “almost complete” release of Learning Hammerspoon, in which most of the material I have planned for the book is included. You can find the following changes:

• New information on how to extend Hammerspoon by writing Lua modules, in addition to Spoons.

April 8th, 2019

I am happy to announce the third release of Learning Hammerspoon, which includes the following changes:

• A brand-new chapter: Writing your own extensions and Spoons. It is not finished yet, but you can find already a complete, working example of a new spoon, which you can use as a starting point for creating your own. I will continue adding more details over the next few days, but in the meantime please let me know how you like it: is the example meaningful? Are the instructions easy to follow?
• Two new introductory sections: The Hyper Key, about useful ways of defining a common set of modifiers for your Hammerspoon keybindings; and Keeping private information separate, about loading separate files into your Hammerspoon configuration.
• Multiple overall improvements in terms of wording, figures and formatting.
• One invisible backend change, but which bears mentioning: this book is now generated using Markua sources instead of the default Leanpub Markdown format used before. This has very little impact on the final book as you see it, but it will make it easier in the future to handle more complex formatting as needed.

October 2018

The first two early releases of the book were published. The second release corrected a number of typos and formatting issues.