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Snap, Jump and Color are free forever — no account, no nag — and so is the notch HUD they draw into, which is always on and has no switch of its own. That is four of the 17. The other 13 unlock with a one-time $19.99 licence for up to 3 Macs, which includes 1 year of updates; so do the notch’s battery, device and now-playing chips. Every install starts with a 14-day trial of everything.
Hammock steps back to the free tier and keeps running. Snap, Jump and Color carry on exactly as before; the paid features switch themselves off. Nothing locks, nothing nags, and none of your settings are lost — activating a licence later brings them all back where you left them. You get a notification two days before the end and one on the day, so it is never a surprise. Rolling the clock back or deleting preferences will not mint a fresh trial: the start date is kept in the login Keychain and paired with a monotonic clock.
Only what a feature needs, and only when you switch that feature on — a fresh install asks for nothing. Accessibility moves and reads windows, so Snap, Layouts, Jump, Palette, Swipe and Sweep need it; Clipboard and Snippets need it too, plus the separate Send Keystrokes permission to paste for you. Screen Recording is what lets OCR capture the area you draw, and it is optional for Color, where it buys the zoom loupe. The Shelf needs Automation only to stash the Finder selection, and Files & Folders only to catch screenshots. Awake, Breaks, Auto-Quit and the notch HUD need nothing at all — Bluetooth only if you switch on the chips that read a device’s battery — and Focus dims with nothing granted. Notifications is the one that belongs to no feature: it is never asked for at launch, only the first time Hammock has something to tell you.
No telemetry, no analytics, no account. Hammock makes exactly three kinds of network call. It asks whether a newer version exists, through Sparkle. It checks a licence or trial against our own endpoint, sending a one-way SHA-256 hash of the Mac’s hardware ID and nothing else. And, only if you choose to create a share link from the Shelf, it uploads one already-encrypted file. Everything else — OCR, the colour picker, clipboard history, snippets, layouts, the shelf itself — happens on the Mac and never leaves it.
No. On a Mac without one — a Mac mini, an iMac, an older Air, or a notched laptop with the lid closed — Hammock draws a stand-in over the middle of the menu bar, and every hint, chip and the Shelf work the same. You can switch the stand-in off in Settings → Notch if you would rather leave the menu bar untouched.
Open Settings → General → License and paste the key from your receipt. One licence covers three Macs at once. If you have lost the key, email us and we will resend it.
Open Settings → General → License on the Mac you are leaving and deactivate it. That frees the seat straight away, and you can paste the same key on the new Mac. You never need to ask us — three Macs can be active at once, and swapping one out is entirely in your hands.
Direct download lets Hammock do the things the sandbox forbids: global shortcuts, moving other apps’ windows, a real file shelf. It is signed and notarised by Apple and updates itself, so you get the same Gatekeeper checks without the sandbox limits.
In ~/Library/Logs/Hammock. Settings → General → Diagnostics switches the detailed log on, reveals the folder in Finder and clears it. It is off by default because it names the files, apps and windows you used; it never leaves your Mac unless you send it. Crashes are recorded there whether the switch is on or not, and the file is capped at 5 MB with one previous generation kept.
Quit Hammock from the menu bar and drag it to the Trash. There are no background helpers to hunt down. What stays behind is a preferences file, the Application Support folder holding clipboard history, snippets and shelved files, and the Logs folder if you ever switched diagnostics on — all three are ordinary files you can delete.
Feature by feature
All 17, with the permission each one asks for. A feature you leave switched off holds none of these, and asks for nothing.
| Feature | Shortcut | Tier | Permissions |
|---|---|---|---|
| SnapPut 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 | Free forever | Accessibility. |
| LayoutsSave where your windows are, and put them all back with one shortcut.Each display setup keeps its own arrangement, so plugging a monitor in gives you a separate layout to save rather than scattering the one you had. It tells you how many windows moved out of how many were saved — an app you have since closed is reported, not guessed at — and ⌃⌥⇧Z puts everything back if a restore was not what you wanted. | ⌃⌥⇧S save · ⌃⌥⇧R restore · ⌃⌥⇧Z undo | Paid | Accessibility. |
| JumpHold the ⌘ right of the space bar, tap a letter, land in that app. | r⌘ + a letter · r⌥ + a letter for windows · r⌘ + a digit for desktops | Free forever | Accessibility. |
| PaletteFind any open window by name, and run anything Hammock does — one list, one shortcut.It lists every window you have open by title — the thing Spotlight cannot do, because it does not know what is on your screen — alongside everything Hammock itself can do: switch a feature on or off, capture text, pick a colour, open any settings pane. It is not a launcher, on purpose. An app that is beachballing gets a quarter-second to answer and is otherwise left out, so one hung app never holds the panel up. | r⌘ r⌥ Space | Paid | Accessibility. |
| SwipeSwitch desktops (Spaces) instantly — no sliding animation. | your usual trackpad swipe | Paid | Accessibility. |
| FocusDim everything behind the window you’re working in. | r⌘ r⌥ F | Paid | None to dim. Accessibility tracks the window you are in more closely, and carries the shortcut. |
| ClipboardThe 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 | Paid | Accessibility, and Send Keystrokes to paste for you. |
| SnippetsSaved text you paste by name. | r⌘ : | Paid | Accessibility, and Send Keystrokes to paste for you. |
| OCRCopy 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 | Paid | Screen Recording to capture. Accessibility only for the shortcut. |
| Element CaptureScreenshot a region, then draw, add text, crop, and hide sensitive parts before you copy or save it.Hold ⌥ as you aim and it snaps to the button, toolbar or window under the pointer — click to grab exactly that, or drag a box freehand. A plain capture lands on the Shelf straight away, or the clipboard when the Shelf is off; hold ⌘ as you release to open the editor first: pen, arrows, lines, boxes and text in any colour, crop, and black out, pixelate or blur anything private — the hidden pixels are destroyed on export, not just covered — then Copy, Save, or drop it on the Shelf. It rides on top of the system ⌘⇧4 rather than replacing it, and shares OCR’s Screen-Recording grant. | ⌃⌥⇧4, or r⌘ r⌥ E | Paid | Screen Recording to capture. Accessibility only for the r⌘ r⌥ E shortcut. |
| ShelfA 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 | Paid | None to park files. Automation to stash the Finder selection, Files & Folders to catch screenshots.Creating a share link needs an activated licence, never a trial. |
| ColorMagnify any pixel on screen and copy its colour in the format you use. | ⌃⌥⇧C, or r⌘ r⌥ C | Free forever | None. Screen Recording is optional and buys the zoom loupe. |
| NotchChips and key hints at the top of the screen. Always on, never takes focus.On a Mac without a notch — a mini, an iMac, an older Air — it draws a stand-in over the middle of the menu bar and everything works the same. | always on | Free forever | None. Bluetooth only for the opt-in device chips.The HUD other features draw into is free and has no switch. The battery, device and now-playing chips are paid. |
| BreaksRests your eyes: every 20 minutes, a short pause screen to look away.One one-shot timer per phase — about three wakeups per 20-minute cycle — where the usual break app runs a polling loop at 1 Hz or faster. | no shortcut — it arrives on its own | Paid | None. |
| AwakeKeep the Mac awake — indefinitely or for a set time.A power assertion held directly, not a caffeinate subprocess. Timed or indefinite, optionally letting the display sleep, ending itself at 10% battery or less, or driven by an app, an external display or a mounted drive. | r⌘ r⌥ A, or right-click the menu-bar icon | Paid | None. |
| SweepQuit an app automatically when its last window closes.Four independent readings have to agree that the app has no window anywhere — including on another Space and in the window server — before anything is quit. Uncertainty always means leave it running. | automatic | Paid | Accessibility. |
| Auto-QuitQuit apps that sit unused in the background. | automatic | Paid | None. |
What each permission does and exactly when macOS asks for it is on the download page.
Write to a person. We usually reply within a day. A licence key you have lost, a permission that will not stick, a bug with a diagnostics log attached — all welcome.