MMacHUD

A heads-up display for your Mac.

MacHUD is an open-source omni-tool for macOS. The idea: your desktop is a working surface, not a pile of windows. You draw the regions, decide what goes where, and keep small single-purpose tools at the edges, ready when you look for them.

  • Draw a layout once. Shift-drag any window into it; a loadout puts every app and page back in its place, on any display or desktop.
  • Tools live in a dock and slide out as panels: clipboard, scratchpad, files, ffmpeg, ImageMagick, dev servers. Each is its own small app.
  • Everything is a command. The whole HUD talks JSON over a socket, so scripts and agents can work your desktop the way you do.
  • Build your own: macOS apps built on HUDKit can be presented as slide-out tools or windowed apps.
Download MacHUD All releases

Free and open source · macOS 14 or later · notarized by Apple

The apps

Small tools that live in MacHUD's dock and panels. Each is its own notarized app: download it here, or install it from MacHUD with Get Apps… in the menu bar (or machud apps install <name>).

Loading the catalog…

Build your own

A MacHUD app is an ordinary Swift app built on HUDKit: it ships a machud.json manifest, answers a small JSON socket contract, and MacHUD finds it, docks it and places its panels. The guides are written so a coding agent can follow them.

Agent guide

Start here: scaffold an app with hud-new-app.sh, build, run and check it against MacHUD.

The contract

The manifest, the socket commands every app answers (hello, panel, state, settings…) and how MacHUD drives them.

MacHUD's API

Every machud command: layouts, loadouts, the tool dock, apps, the catalog and installs.

Install notes

Notarized downloads

Every zip here is signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple, so Gatekeeper opens it without warnings. Unzip, drag the app to Applications, open it.

MacHUD checks each download's size and SHA-256 against the catalog and refuses anything Gatekeeper rejects.

First launch

MacHUD lives in the menu bar (no Dock icon). With no HUD apps installed it opens Settings → Apps once with the bundled tools selected: one click installs them.

Apps install into /Applications (or ~/Applications when that is not writable) and update in place.

Accessibility

To see and move other apps' windows MacHUD needs Accessibility access: System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility. It starts snapping as soon as access is granted.

Loadouts that open browser pages may also ask for Automation access to that browser.