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Menu-bar utility · macOS 13+

Your Mac, off duty.

Seventeen small tools that used to be seventeen background apps, in one native menu-bar app. ~11 MB on its shipped defaults, and a measured 0.0% CPU while it waits — because it is asleep until you touch a key.

Download for macOSSee all 17

Snap, Jump and Color free forever · $19.99 once for the rest · 14-day trial of everything, no card

memory on shipped defaults
~11 MB~22 MB with every feature on
CPU while it waits
0.0%zero wakeups measured over 60 seconds
repeating timers
0a clipboard manager polling twice a second wakes your Mac 172,800 times a day
tools, one icon
17one process, one login item, one updater

The problem

Your menu bar is a junk drawer.

Six single-purpose apps to do six small things. Six processes resident all day, six updaters, six login items, six sets of permissions, and two or three of them billing you monthly. Each one is 20 to 100 MB of Electron or a polling loop you cannot see.

Hammock is one process, one login item, one updater. Here is what goes in the bin.

  • Window managerSnap
  • Window-layout saverLayouts
  • App switcherJump
  • Window switcherJump, Palette
  • Space switcherSwipe
  • Clipboard managerClipboard
  • Snippet expanderSnippets
  • Screen-text grabberOCR
  • Screenshot annotatorElement Capture
  • Colour pickerColor
  • File shelfShelf
  • Screen dimmerFocus
  • Break timerBreaks
  • Keep-awake toggleAwake
  • Idle-app quitterSweep, Auto-Quit

17 tools

A whole toolkit, quietly.

All seventeen ship inert: fifteen have a switch and it is off, and the notch HUD draws nothing until something asks it to. You turn on what you want, and the rest costs nothing at all — not memory, not a subscription to an OS event, not a wakeup. The first launch runs each feature while you are reading about it.

r⌘ is the ⌘ right of the space bar; r⌥ the ⌥ beside it. Nothing else uses them; the left-hand pair is untouched.

Snap

Free forever

Put a window in half, a third, or a corner — by keyboard, by dragging to an edge, or by nudging the mouse.

⌃⌥ + arrows, or hold ⌃⌥ for the dial

Clipboard

Paid

The last 20 things you copied — text, images, or files. Hold ⌘V for a moment to pick an older one.

No pasteboard polling: the listener is armed by the ⌘ you already pressed and reads the pasteboard once per real ⌘C. Type to search the whole item, not the shortened preview, and press → on a row to paste it as plain text.

hold ⌘V

OCR

Paid

Copy text out of a picture or a video — draw a box round it and it’s on your clipboard.

Apple’s Vision framework, entirely on the Mac, in the languages your Mac is set up for. A barcode or QR code in the box comes back as its payload instead of as text.

r⌘ r⌥ T

Shelf

Paid

A drop spot at the top of the screen — drag files up to park them, drag them out later.

Zip and unzip, rename in place, convert JPG/PNG/HEIC/TIFF/PDF, strip metadata, AirDrop, Quick Look, and group browsing. Hold ⌘ and the shelf grows a band showing its keys.

r⌘ r⌥ S, or drag to the notch

Creating a share link needs an activated licence, never a trial.

One HUD at the top of the screen

Features draw into the same non-activating panel above the notch, or over the middle of the menu bar on a Mac without one. It never takes key focus.

Jump — Hold r⌘ and every app gets a letter.

Notch — Battery, charging and connected devices.

Breaks — A countdown, then a short pause screen.

All 17, in the same app

Windows and navigation

  • Snap
    Free forever

    Put a window in half, a third, or a corner — by keyboard, by dragging to an edge, or by nudging the mouse.

  • Layouts
    Paid

    Save where your windows are, and put them all back with one shortcut.

  • Jump
    Free forever

    Hold the ⌘ right of the space bar, tap a letter, land in that app.

  • Palette
    Paid

    Find any open window by name, and run anything Hammock does — one list, one shortcut.

  • Swipe
    Paid

    Switch desktops (Spaces) instantly — no sliding animation.

  • Focus
    Paid

    Dim everything behind the window you’re working in.

Capture and clipboard

  • Clipboard
    Paid

    The last 20 things you copied — text, images, or files. Hold ⌘V for a moment to pick an older one.

  • Snippets
    Paid

    Saved text you paste by name.

  • OCR
    Paid

    Copy text out of a picture or a video — draw a box round it and it’s on your clipboard.

  • Element Capture
    Paid

    Screenshot a region, then draw, add text, crop, and hide sensitive parts before you copy or save it.

  • Shelf
    Paid

    A drop spot at the top of the screen — drag files up to park them, drag them out later.

    Creating a share link needs an activated licence, never a trial.

  • Color
    Free forever

    Magnify any pixel on screen and copy its colour in the format you use.

Ambient and wellbeing

  • Notch
    Free forever

    Chips and key hints at the top of the screen. Always on, never takes focus.

    The HUD other features draw into is free and has no switch. The battery, device and now-playing chips are paid.

  • Breaks
    Paid

    Rests your eyes: every 20 minutes, a short pause screen to look away.

  • Awake
    Paid

    Keep the Mac awake — indefinitely or for a set time.

  • Sweep
    Paid

    Quit an app automatically when its last window closes.

  • Auto-Quit
    Paid

    Quit apps that sit unused in the background.

Every shortcut and permission, feature by feature

Download for macOSSee the price14-day trial of everything, no card

The mechanism

How it stays this light.

Not by doing less. By never being awake when there is nothing to do. Four rules hold the whole thing up.

  • Event-driven, never polling

    Every wakeup is something the OS pushed. Hammock reads the pasteboard once, on the ⌘C you actually pressed, rather than sampling it on a loop for the rest of the day.

  • Off means off, not flagged off

    Every feature implements one contract: deactivate() tears down every OS resource it holds — taps, observers, notification tokens, run-loop sources, windows — rather than setting a boolean and staying subscribed. A feature you have switched off receives no events and cannot wake the process. That applies per sub-setting too: the battery watcher exists only while something needs the battery.

  • Built when you ask for it

    Features load lazily, so the ones you never switch on are never constructed. Two features that want the same OS event stream share one subscription owned by neither of them, so a modifier press wakes the process exactly once no matter how many things are listening.

  • Native Swift, one dependency

    Apple frameworks talked to directly — Accessibility, CoreGraphics, IOKit, Vision. No Electron, no helper processes, no shell-outs to caffeinate. Sparkle, for self-updates, is the only third-party package in the project, and it is there because rolling our own updater would be less safe, not more.

And where it is not perfect — four places

Every memory figure on this page came from footprint on an installed build, not an estimate. Which means we also have to tell you this:

  • Open Settings and memory climbs to about 52 MB and stays there. The window is deliberately reused, and each SwiftUI hosting view it builds holds on to roughly 5 MB. We would rather publish that than a number you would catch us out on.
  • OCR peaks while it runs. Recognising a region costs real memory and CPU for the second it takes, and then gives it back.
  • Focus and Sweep each build their own Accessibility window observer, so with both on the frontmost app carries two subscriptions instead of one shared. It costs a doubled subscription, not correctness, and it is written down as work still to do.
  • Swipe has to swallow your real trackpad swipe to replay it instantly, which puts a blocking event tap on our main run loop. While Swipe is on, a stall here would be added input latency for every app on the Mac. Nothing slow is allowed on that thread, and the tap logs it if the OS ever times us out.

Share links

We host the file. We cannot read it — or its name.

Right-click a file on the Shelf and choose Copy Share Link. Your Mac encrypts it, uploads the ciphertext, and puts a link on your clipboard. The decryption key rides after the # in that link, and browsers never send that part to a server.

Not the file name either, and not the type. The recipient opens the link and it decrypts in their browser. The shelf and notch apps that offer links upload under their own keys, so the operator can read it — none of them claims end-to-end encryption.

Read exactly what we can and cannot see, and the three things worth knowing before you send one, in the privacy policy.

Encryption
AES-128-GCM, RFC 8188, done on your Mac before a byte is sent
Key location
The URL fragment, which never reaches a server
Expiry
7 days by default — or 1, 3 or 30, your choice
Size limit
95 MB per link
Revocable
Settings → Shelf lists every live link and kills any of them
Default
Off. Nothing uploads until you switch it on and press the button

Pricing

Pay once. Or don’t.

No subscription. The licence is yours, and the version you own keeps working whatever happens to us.

Free forever

$0

Snap, Jump and Color, with no account, no time limit and no nagging. They are the three we decided should never sit behind a licence.

  • Window snapping by keyboard, edge drag and the ⌃⌥ dial
  • Jump to any app with the ⌘ right of the space bar
  • The colour picker, with the loupe
  • The notch HUD that Snap and Jump draw into
Download

Everything

one time

$19.99once, not per year

All 17 features on up to 3 Macs. Every install starts with a 14-day trial of the lot — no card, nothing to cancel. When it ends, Hammock steps back to the free tier and keeps running: no lock screen, no nag, and your settings wait for you.

  • The other 13 features, including Palette, Layouts, Clipboard, Shelf and OCR — plus the notch’s battery, device and now-playing chips
  • 3 Macs at once, and you can free a seat yourself from Settings
  • 1 year of updates included; after that the version you own keeps working, and renewing is optional
  • Encrypted share links from the Shelf
  • Lessons ignore your licence — after a trial ends you can still see exactly what a paid feature does
  • No account. The licence check sends a one-way hash of your Mac’s hardware ID and nothing else
Start the 14-day trialBuy now

Bought through Polar, our merchant of record. A 14-day refund window, no questions — see the terms.

One icon. 17 tools. Nothing running.

Quit the other six, and get the memory, the login items and the subscriptions back.

Download for macOSSee what changed lately

Version 1.3.2 · macOS 13 Ventura or later · Apple silicon and Intel · signed and notarised by Apple