I have a long history of wrist and finger issues ever since I started on my coding career. Being a climber doesn’t help. With the influence of a co-worker I made the move about 6 months ago to use NeoVim (instead of VSCode) and created my custom Dactyl-ManuForm keyboard. I feel like I fell in love with coding all over again. I love improving and customizing my workflow, so it felt very natural and exciting.
Quickly, I started exploring how I can use my keyboard as much as possible, and my trackpad as little as possible, since it is the main culprit of my wrist pains. I switched most of the apps I use to ones that support keyboard usage and shortcuts. There are two apps I still heavily use my trackpad, my email client (Apple’s “Mail”) and the browser (Arc). I just didn’t find an email client that works well with all the keyboard functionality I need, and I don’t even want to think about navigating the web with my keyboard alone.
So I still need to use my trackpad, but I wanted to minimize my usage as much as possible. I also use 2 large external monitors, so moving the cursor from one to the other requires a lot of movement. I wanted my cursor to automatically move to the active application (in focus), which I switch between using my keyboard and Raycast.
After looking for a while with no good solution in sight, I finally came across Hammerspoon. Hammerspoon is a powerful automation tool for Mac, which allows you to use lua and run scripts on your OS. Since I already used lua a bunch to configure my NeoVim, it seemed like the perfect solution.
Hammerspoon has a plugin ecosystem (called spoons), and after browsing it for a bit (getting all sorts of ideas), I came across a spoon that did exactly what I needed.
After installing Hammerspoon and the extension, I was ready to rock. The app installs in your .config folder, and all you need to do is add a init.lua file to load your extensions and configs. Mine looks like this:
mouse_follows_focus = hs.loadSpoon("MouseFollowsFocus")
mouse_follows_focus:configure({})
mouse_follows_focus:start()
That’s it! The spoon is installed in the /spoons folder, so everything is contained right there to inspect. Enjoy!