1. Install and first run

In this chapter you’ll get the haw binary onto your machine, confirm it works, turn on tab completion — and then take your very first haw run, watching the keyboard cockpit open. It’s short: we want you at a prompt fast, and we want you to see where the course is heading.

A one-time setup, then you’re at the prompt for the rest of the course.

The tool ships as a single binary named haw. There’s no runtime, no interpreter, nothing to keep updated alongside it. The current release is v0.1.7.

📦 1. Install it

Pick the line that matches your setup — all of them install the same haw binary.

cargo install hawser                              # Rust / crates.io (canonical)
brew install nastwinns/tap/hawser                 # macOS + Linux (Homebrew)

On Windows, use Scoop:

scoop bucket add nastwinns https://github.com/Nastwinns/scoop-bucket
scoop install hawser

On a Linux server, container, or air-gapped host, the static musl binary is the easiest choice — it’s fully static (no glibc, no runtime), so one file just runs:

curl -sSL https://github.com/Nastwinns/hawser/releases/download/v0.1.7/haw-0.1.7-x86_64-unknown-linux-musl.tar.gz \
  | tar xz && sudo install haw /usr/local/bin/

For every other channel (.deb/.rpm, AUR, Nix, Docker), plus signature verification and the full air-gap workflow, see Installing hawser.

✅ 2. Verify it works

Whatever channel you used, confirm the binary is on your PATH:

haw --version

You should see the version print:

haw 0.1.7

If you get “command not found”, the install directory isn’t on your PATH yet — for cargo, that’s ~/.cargo/bin. Fix that and re-run.

Now peek at the full command surface — you don’t need to read it all, just get a feel:

haw --help

You’ll see the subcommands we’ll cover: sync, status, tree, run, build, test, change, plugins, and more. Every one is a single guessable word.

A quick taste of haw at the command line — every subcommand is one guessable word.

⌨️ 3. Turn on shell completions

This is a small quality-of-life win that pays off all course long: press Tab and the shell fills in subcommands and flags for you.

haw completions <shell> prints a completion script to stdout. Redirect it to the right place for your shell:

haw completions zsh  > ~/.zfunc/_haw                 # zsh
haw completions bash > /etc/bash_completion.d/haw    # bash
haw completions fish > ~/.config/fish/completions/haw.fish   # fish

🚁 4. Your first run — open the cockpit

Here’s the reward. haw isn’t only a batch of subcommands: run it with no subcommand at all and it opens a full-screen, keyboard-driven cockpit for your fleet.

haw

You don’t have a workspace yet, so there’s nothing real to show. Good news: there’s a built-in demo controller, populated with canned repos, PRs, and CI runs, so every view has something in it — no network, no setup:

haw dash --demo

A live fleet grid fills the terminal. Move with ↑/↓ (or k/j, Vim-style), press Enter to drill into a repo, Esc to come back, ? for the help overlay, and q to quit.

The cockpit you just opened: the fleet grid, drill-downs, and keyboard actions — all in the terminal.

✅ Recap

• haw is a single binary — install it with cargo, brew, scoop, or the static musl archive.
• haw --version should print haw 0.1.7; haw --help lists every command.
• haw completions <shell> gives you tab completion — set it up now, thank yourself later.
• Bare haw (or haw dash --demo) opens the cockpit — your first glimpse of mission control, explored in depth in Chapter 4.
• The full install matrix covers signed releases and air-gapped hosts.

👉 Next

Now let’s give haw something real to manage. First stop: the manifest — where you declare your fleet → 2. The manifest.