Big news: Hammer for Mac is making a comeback! After officially declaring it dead, I couldn’t resist diving back in to rebuild this beloved app from the ground up.
The goal? A fresh, modern Hammer for 2025—simple, native, and perfect for those of us who love working directly with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript without the complexity of command-line tools.
I’ll be sharing updates, progress, and behind-the-scenes insights here as I rebuild Hammer with:
A blazing-fast Swift-based engine.
Streamlined templates and deployment workflows.
A vision for integrating generative AI to enhance, not complicate.
But I need your help! Whether you’re a longtime fan or curious newcomer, I’d love your feedback, ideas, and testing help. Let’s build the Hammer you want to see.
Drop your thoughts below, and let’s kick off this journey together.
Cheers,
Steve
Read more about the vision behind the new Hammer for Mac on our Medium post.
I’ve been WordPressing sites for many years and lately wishing for something much simpler. (publii is on my radar, but not quite what I want)
The pureness of plain html and CSS beckons.
I will miss using automaticcss though. I’m going to assume that hammer will enable CSS library use, so as long as I can generate the CSS I’ll be good to go?
Automatic CSS was originally utility class based, but has become much more than that, with a BEM based approach to modularising common design patterns but a central dashboard allowed for tweaking the look of a site, after the event.
It kept spacing and font sizes relational, and simplified thinking about colors, amongst other things.
Not as complex as tailwind.
I like the idea of coupling HTML templates with BEM classes and being able to use generated CSS for styling.
There’s a point in every hand built project where the CSS gets unwieldy and Automatic CSS helped avoid that.
Instead of writing new CSS for every new module, you could use pre-exisiting CSS
I think the appeal of frameworks is that they take the work of naming things and thinking about best practice away.
I’m a design in the browser guy, so I like to be able to tweak things. Publii’s themes seem far more inaccessible than WordPress themes.
Using themes and frameworks speed up the workflow dramatically.
I’m pretty much retired from Web Dev now, but worked through the Browser Wars as a PSD to HTML guy. I spent the last part of my career building sites fast for clients with WordPress, themes, and most recently page builders like Bricks.
When you’re building small business sites, hours can make a difference to profit.
When I look back on the PSD to HTML/CSS I wrote (with great nostalgia) I realise that I took weeks to create what WordPress and a page builder would get done in days or hours.
Now that I’m working on private projects I want the finest of control, the pride of best practice and cleanest code and the simplicity of tweaks that don’t break everything.
Hand coded static sites are the most performant, but carry a maintenance overhead.
The balance between clean code, performance and easy to maintain is where the battle lies I think!
After officially declaring it dead, I couldn’t resist diving back in to rebuild this beloved app from the ground up.
Whether you’re a longtime fan or curious newcomer, I’d love your feedback, ideas, and testing help. Let’s build the Hammer you want to see.
Read more about the vision behind the new Hammer for Mac on our Medium post.