Homebrew vs Hammerspoon

Homebrew makes it easy for people to quickly install any open source software (that is contained within the apps repositories) for Mac.

Once installed, you control Homebrew using the brew command. You can find packages using brew search, install them using brew install and remove them using brew uninstall.

Macports seems to be able to get into a bad state where new packages are unable to be installed, or installed software was unable to be updated. This simply hasn't happened with Homebrew. In addition to not having to deal with corruption problems, Homebrew installs packages in userland. Not requiring root to install software is a big win.

Homebrew as much as possible uses already existing libraries and tools to install software thus making builds quick and requiring few dependencies.

Homebrew installs packages to their own directory and then symlinks their files into /usr/local. Homebrew won’t install files outside its prefix, and you can place a Homebrew installation wherever you like.

One of the things to like about Homebrew is that it refuses to run things under sudo most of the time. This is a great policy, but it causes issues when you want to create symlinks or install in places that SIP has changed permissions on.

Homebrew’s recipes try very hard to use the existing tools and libraries in OS/X, so they tend to build much faster and require fewer dependent libraries.

https://github.com/Hammerspoon/hammerspoon/issues
They do fix issues that come from the community.

Hammerspoon's Lua scripting and broad API allows you to perform any action you can imagine on your mac. It hooks into many OS APIs directly and has some high-level APIs to manipulate things like Spotify or iTunes. See the full list here.

Hammerspoon lets you hook into OS level events and trigger any action you can imagine. From setting up a simple keyboard shortcut to launching a complex workflow using multiple apps and scripts.