hacker

An opinionated macOS, raised in the fog: tiling windows, a bar, a themed terminal. The desktop most people install haus by installing.

hacker is a Mac arranged like a tiling Linux rig, but native to the grain of the Mac: fog-grey, keyboard-first, and the same after you wipe the machine. It is the desktop you get if you don't pick one, and the one most people meet haus through.

You never edit the desktop to use it. The installer scaffolds a thin config of your own at ~/.config/nix that consumes it as an input, so your machine stays yours and haus stays upstream.

curl -fsSL https://hausfold.co/nebelhaus.sh | bash

That URL picks this desktop, so the installer skips the question. Install has the rest: what the script does, how to read it first, and the one command that actually changes the Mac.

What it turns on

haus is organised into rooms, each one a capability with its own switch. hacker turns nearly all of them on.

Room	What you get
Windows	Tiling launched at boot, and Caps-Lock as the leader key instead of a chord
Bar	Workspaces, weather, media, battery, clock, and a light that reddens when something has stopped
Launcher	pounce on ⌘Space, where every command is a file you can write
Shelf	perch, dropping out of the notch to catch a drag on its way somewhere else
Development	Ghostty, zellij, zsh, a tinted prompt, helix and a toolbelt that all matches
Focus	One hotkey for Do Not Disturb, your Slack status, and your own hooks
Security	Touch ID for `sudo`, inside a multiplexer too, and secrets declared rather than pasted
AI	Coding agents, each in its own checkout of the repo, so they never collide
Appearance	The nebelung palette and a generated wallpaper, rendered onto twenty-odd tools at once

Anything it chose, your own file overrides in a line; see Customize a desktop.

First moves

The first switch has finished. Windows now tile themselves, the menu bar has been replaced, your terminal opens into a themed session, ⌘Space belongs to the palette, and haus is on your PATH. Here's the muscle memory.

Keys	What happens
⌘Space	The palette. Type a few letters, hit Return. Start here for everything
Tap ⇪, then a letter	Launch or focus that app. `T` is the terminal, `B` the browser
Tap ⇪, then an arrow	Move focus between tiled windows. Keep arrowing; hold ⇧ to move the window instead
Tap ⇪, then a digit	Jump to that workspace. Add ⇧ to throw the current window there
Tap ⇪, then /	The cheatsheet, generated from your app list, so it is never out of date

Tap Caps-Lock, don't hold it

It's a leader key now, not a modifier. Tap and release, then press the letter.

Try these in order: tap ⇪ T and the terminal opens and tiles itself; ⌘Space, type saf, Return and Safari launches; ⇪ then ← / → jumps focus between the two; ⌥/ flips the split between horizontal and vertical; ⌘Space, type emoji, Return turns the palette into an emoji grid.

One permission to grant: a few palette features use a keyboard path macOS gates behind Accessibility. Everything else works without it.

pounce --request-accessibility

The rest of the keys are the rooms' own, and they are written out in full where they're configured rather than copied here: Windows has tiling, the leader and every workspace throw, including how to move all of it onto keys you'd rather use; Development has the terminal's chord set; pounce has the palette. There is also a live copy on your own machine (tap ⇪ /), generated from your own tables, so use that one when they disagree.

Making it yours

Your settings live in one file, and haus edit opens it. The tweaks people reach for first are an accent, an editor, and an app with a launcher key and a workspace of its own.

haus.theme.accent = "sapphire";        # one accent, everywhere
haus.hearth.editorName = "neovim";     # named, so haus installs it

haus.roster.slack = {                  # an app, with a launcher key
  key = "s";
  name = "Slack";
  appId = "com.tinyspeck.slackmacgap";
  cask = "slack";
};
haus.workspaces.S = {                  # …and a workspace of its own
  key = "s";
  icon = ":slack:";
  apps = [ "slack" ];
};

Then haus rebuild. Customize a desktop is the rest of what that file can say, and the haus reference is every command the CLI has.

What it turns on

First moves

Making it yours

Where to go next

Choose a desktop

Customize a desktop

Windows

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