BashCut

A native macOS video editor that coding agents can drive.
Everything the UI does, Claude Code and Codex can do through the bashcut CLI or MCP.

Download · TestFlight beta · Docs · Automation · Plugins · Agent kit · Issues

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About

BashCut is a native macOS video editor built on AVFoundation, with a Claude Code / Codex terminal docked beside the timeline. Preview and export share one composition engine, so what you see is what you export. Projects are plain JSON next to your footage: agents and scripts read and edit them through the same atomic, undoable edit operations the UI uses.

BashCut is under active development: the M0 foundation is accepted on real footage and most of the editor and agent features (M1–M3, M5) are in place. See implementation status for what is verified and what is left.

Use the AI you already pay for

No extra AI bill: BashCut works with the subscriptions and apps you already have.

Whichever you pick, the agent edits through the same undoable commands as the UI: every change lands in History, shows in Show Changes and can be undone. See Automation.

What's inside

• Layered timeline: linked audio, sections, snapping, beat grid, split/trim/move, gaps, freeze frames, constant speed and ramps, keyframes, transitions
• Viewer and source viewer with In/Out, Insert/Overwrite, safe area and compare
• Captions and text with presets, SRT import, Vietnamese and English
• Color: LUTs, exposure, contrast, saturation and adjustment layers
• Audio: volume, fades, ducking under speech, loudness, voiceover recording, source-aligned waveforms
• Review checks, history, autosave with recovery, external-change reload and conflict handling
• H.264 export queue with burned-in captions; OTIO export
• Agent dock with real Claude, Codex and Shell terminals, plus the agent kit of editing skills
• bashcut CLI and MCP server: every UI action and dialog, with dry runs and revision checks
• Out-of-process plugins for transcription, voice, beats and loudness, from the plugin registry

Install

Requires macOS 14 or later.

Homebrew

brew install --cask dongnguyenvie/tap/bashcut

This installs BashCut.app into /Applications and links the bashcut CLI and bashcut-mcp server into Homebrew's bin, so agents in any terminal can drive the app. Update with brew upgrade --cask bashcut; remove with brew uninstall --cask bashcut (add --zap to also delete settings and caches).

Download a release

Download BashCut-<version>.dmg (or .zip) from the latest release, open it and drag BashCut to Applications. Builds are signed with Developer ID and notarized by Apple; check a download against the release's SHA256SUMS with shasum -a 256 -c --ignore-missing SHA256SUMS. To use the CLI from a terminal, link it yourself:

sudo ln -s /Applications/BashCut.app/Contents/MacOS/bashcut /usr/local/bin/bashcut
sudo ln -s /Applications/BashCut.app/Contents/MacOS/bashcut-mcp /usr/local/bin/bashcut-mcp

TestFlight

Join the public beta on TestFlight (needs the TestFlight app). The TestFlight build is the sandboxed Mac App Store build: it runs only the plugins bundled with the app, and its bundled CLI cannot run from a regular terminal.

Or build BashCut from source, below.

How to Build

Requires macOS 14+, Xcode with Swift 6, and network access for the first package resolution.

scripts/run.sh

This builds with SwiftPM, packages build/BashCut.app, signs it with the first Apple Development identity in your keychain (or BASHCUT_SIGN_IDENTITY) so macOS keeps folder-access grants across rebuilds, and opens it. The app executable is BashCutApp and the bundled CLI is bashcut, avoiding a name collision on case-insensitive disks.

To try a change against every timeline case, generate the sample project shown above (needs ffmpeg):

scripts/sample-project.py

For Xcode, install XcodeGen >= 2.46, then run scripts/generate-project.sh and open BashCut.xcodeproj (generated from project.yml). Xcode builds the string catalog; the SwiftPM launcher copies equivalent .strings resources. The UI follows the system language.

Verify

scripts/verify.sh build
scripts/verify.sh test
scripts/verify.sh perf       # 20 synthetic clips, ~30 seconds, 1080×1920
scripts/verify.sh lint       # requires SwiftLint
scripts/verify.sh xcode test # regenerates and tests the Xcode project (requires XcodeGen)

Pure model tests also run on their own with cd Packages/BashCutCore && swift test. Tests never use the real video workspace or agent CLIs, and package downloads happen at dependency resolution, not in tests.

Related repositories

Two other repositories are part of BashCut. Contributions are welcome in each:

Changes to the editor itself, its commands and the plugin API belong in this repository.

Documentation

• Documentation index: guides, reference and design specs
• Automation: CLI and MCP and the generated command reference
• Project format
• Implementation status
• CONTRIBUTING.md: build layout and one-file templates (agent providers, model adapters, commands, capabilities, timeline formats)
• CHANGELOG.md

License

MIT. See LICENSE.