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!
I’m new to all this, but I’m looking for a “simple” way to generate a static web site, based around a template. I’ve used WordPress for years, and I develop software for web using Blazor, so can do HTML and CSS, but that’s for other people. For me, I want a way to create a template for headers and footers and then to put either some simple HTML in, or markdown. I don’t want javascript particularly, and I don’t want clever. There are systems out there that do all this “manually” with fancy scripts, but I want as close to WYSIWYG as makes sense (if markdown, I don’t really care too much about seeing it formatted as there are tools to watch files and provide a visualisation, but if it does, so much the better), and then click a button and the site is output to a directory I can upload somewhere.
In summary, I think there is a hole in the available tools that keeps things simple, which allowing something more complex if wanted. I look forward to seeing what comes from this rebirth. Thanks!
Still working on Hammer and importantly, using it for various static site projects. I haven’t had as much time to focus on it as I would like, but hey, that’s life.
I’m very close to a testable version, but I am currently wrestling with the length of time it takes a build to complete, particularly as the file count increases. It’s not a build / compilation problem per se, rather how the filesystem events work which I’m less familiar with, but working through it…
Curious if you’ve got a beta build. I’m looking for something simple for a static site I’m about ready to launch in about a week…and wondering if you’ve got anything for me to test out?
Hi @Rogie great to see you here - I’m just trying to get the new Forge out and violently hammering away (while simultaneously building / iterating Hammer as I’m using it for the new product site and docs sites). I’m not quite in the headspace for sharing it immediately, but I would love to have your eyes on it as soon as I can, most likely in a few weeks - so sorry it probably isn’t soon enough for your initial launch.
I’d still love to test it, when the time comes, if you’re still up for it! I think my site will be just fine as a hand coded, no build process, no includes site for launch. But, happy to fold it into the process when you are ready!
Yooo steve, I’m about ready to throw down some time (in about a week or so) on some significant new site updates. I already launched my simpler version of my site a few weeks ago. I’m curious if there’s anything in a testable state in the next few weeks coming up?
I’m starting to hit that barrier where includes and templating are probably going to be needed…
I’d be very interested in trying this out. I use CodeKit to manage dozens of static sites and curious to see how Hammer might compare and potentially replace it for me.
I’m curious to hear more about your usage of Codekit and in particular where you feel something else (which may or may not be Hammer) could perform better for you.
Codekit has been around a long time, it was always a really nice product (albeit I’ve not tried it for a long time). What’s it not doing for you? Where are the gaps? What are the missed opportunities?
I am a web developer, love simple and clean code and have tried publii – but found the workflow of needing a second environment on each computer of the contributing persons cumbersome.
At the moment I am using bludit now and then – large websites being build with drupal.
Would love to have a tool for building up small html based sites.
Therefore I am ready to test hammer
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.
