BashCut

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

Editing

• Layered timeline: as many video, overlay, text, sticker, adjustment, voiceover, music and SFX layers as you need, with linked sound, sections, snapping, multi-select, gaps, split, trim, move, lift and ripple delete
• Viewer and source viewer: In/Out, Insert/Overwrite, viewer zoom, safe area and before/after compare
• Speed: constant speed, reverse, freeze frames and CapCut-style speed ramps (montage, hero, bullet, jump-cut, flash in/out, or your own curve)
• Motion: keyframes for position, scale, rotation, opacity and volume, shown on the timeline, plus animation presets (zoom, pan, Ken Burns, pop-in, slide-up, zoom-punch); crop and rounded corners
• Transitions: dissolve, whip, blink, zoom, spin, shutter, wipe and saved transition presets
• Still images and stickers (emoji or image) on the timeline
• Change the canvas of an open project (9:16, 16:9, 1:1…) without rebuilding it

Captions and text

• Transcribe speech into captions with a local Whisper plugin, import and export SubRip
• Word-by-word captions: highlight, karaoke and reveal styles
• Text presets for hook titles, place labels, keyword stickers and chapter cards, keeping their style when edited; Vietnamese and English throughout

Color

• LUT import (.cube), exposure, contrast and saturation
• Adjustment layers and filter stacks that grade everything below them
• Looks and style kits: save a grade (with its LUT) and a caption style, apply them to the next video in one step

Sound

• Volume, fades, volume keyframes, ducking music under speech, loudness normalization at export
• Voiceover recording, and text-to-speech takes through a voice plugin (VieNeu TTS for Vietnamese, cloned voices)
• Beat grid from the music, for cutting on the beat
• Measure loudness, true peak and speech-band energy, and sync a camera with a screen recording by their sound, without ffmpeg

Library

• One library for music and SFX, text styles, stickers, effect recipes, transition presets and looks: built-in items, your own (this project or every project), and packs that plugins ship
• Search, tags, packs, import and export of packs, usage stats, and search or generate new items through plugins

Review and export

• Review checks: gaps in the picture, repeated framing between cuts, long caption lines, speech-recognition loops, voiceover too close to real speech; full history; autosave with crash recovery; reload when files change on disk, with conflict handling
• Preview proxies for heavy footage; export presets for TikTok, YouTube 1080p and 4K, a quick draft and ProRes, queued in the background, with burned-in captions and an optional .srt; OTIO export

AI agents

• Agent dock: real Claude Code, Codex and Shell terminals beside the timeline, plus chat agents and terminal agents from plugins (AI Editor with your own API key, Antigravity…)
• Send to Agent: select clips and send them with your request; the scope guard keeps the agent's edits to those clips, or asks you first
• Show Changes: see what an agent changed, jump to it, and undo it as one step
• Knowledge: agents remember lessons, your preferences and project facts between sessions; review them in the Knowledge window's inbox, edit project notes and skills, and revert any change from its history
• The agent kit: editing skills (footage survey, beat cuts, sound mix, captions, colour, effects, voiceover, style study, self-learning) loaded into every agent tab
• Agent permissions: choose what agents may do without asking (edits, exports, plugin actions), or allow everything

Automation

• The bashcut CLI and MCP server cover every UI action, dialog, shortcut and view: 140 commands, with dry runs, revision checks and one undoable edit per call (command reference)
• ui frame renders any frame to a PNG, so an agent can look at its own work
• Command palette (⇧⌘P), a full Mac menu bar and searchable Settings

Plugins

• Out-of-process plugins in any language: capabilities (transcription, voice, beats, loudness, sync, library search and generate), actions in menus and context menus, hooks on editor events, options, chat and terminal agents, library packs and agent skills that teach agents how to use them
• Plugin UI: a plugin can have its own panel in the left rail, tabs in the agent dock and sheets, with views BashCut draws natively from the components the plugin sends (lists, forms, buttons, images, audio previews); plugins can build on each other (generate speech through your voice plugin, require another plugin)
• A signed plugin registry with Browse, one-click install, daily update checks, Trust per plugin and dependency setup that never needs Terminal; plugins from a link or a folder too. See Writing plugins

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 Xc