Meet hyperbin: Give your Trash Bin some Personality

Your trash bin has so much potential to make you smile. But it just sits there while you toss things into it. The only feedback you see is an icon change. That is about as much personality as a parking meter.

hyperbin fixes this.

It renders a delightful animation over your Trash — or your Recycle Bin — and grows the effect as the bin fills up gently (overtly?) reminding you to empty it. Empty the bin, and the effect retreats.

Now your trash has gone from a boring bin to a source of whimsical joy.

Three effects

hyperbin ships three effects, and you can switch between them at any time from the menu:

Flies. A swarm that lands on the bin, walks about, and takes off when you bring your pointer close. They feel so real you might want to swat them away. Their motion is modeled on actual fly behavior – ew, but kinda cool.

Ooze. A translucent green gel that fills the bin and runs down its outside, with a puddle gathering at the foot. It has eyes. The eyes follow your cursor. Bring the pointer over the bin, and they converge on it until you pull away. Sorry, not sorry.

Tentacles. Arms that reach out of the bin, feel along the rim, slap it, coil, and curl back up. When you empty the bin, they thrash their way back under the rubbish. More arms join as the bin fills. It is hard to unsee.

How it knows

None of these are a fixed clip playing on a loop. Each one reacts to two things you control: how much effect you want, and how full the bin actually is.

The Trash Threshold — how much in the bin counts as “full” — and an Amount dial that runs from Just a Little all the way up to Make It Stop. (That last one is a setting. We will not defend it.) In the default mode, the effect scales with your bin, so a near-empty Trash gets less effect and a jammed one gets the full performance.

It sits in your menu bar on macOS or your system tray on Windows. It starts at login by default. You can switch it off at any time.

An ode to open source

hyperbin is free. Direct download. No store, no account, no license to activate, no “pro” tier with the tentacles locked behind it. It is open source — you can read the code — and it ships as a straight download for every platform:

Give your trash bin some character.

Download hyperbin for free (macOS) or grab the Windows build and give your trash can a life.