Moskito Easy MCP — easy install

Let Claude and ChatGPT drive Adobe Illustrator, After Effects, Premiere Pro, and Photoshop.

One app. Nothing else to install — no Node, no Python, no Homebrew, no terminal.

Install

1. Download Moskito Easy MCP and drag it to your Applications folder.

2. Double-click it. macOS will refuse the first time — that's expected. Then open System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll down, and click Open Anyway next to Moskito Easy MCP. Only needed once.

   (Right-click → Open no longer works — Apple removed that shortcut in macOS 15. The app isn't signed by Apple, which costs €99/year.)

3. A window opens. Press Set everything up.

That's it. The window tells you what's connected and what isn't.

Related MCP server: adobe-mcp

What it does

Moskito Easy MCP lives in your menu bar (the ✨ icon). Click it → Open Control Panel to get back to the settings window any time, or Quit Moskito Easy MCP to stop it. There's also a ⚙ button in the Illustrator and After Effects panels.

Keep it running while you work.

If a panel is open in an Adobe app but hasn't connected, the control panel says so and offers a Connect button that presses the panel's own Connect for you — and sets it to connect by itself from then on.

Updates

The app checks for a new version on launch and offers a one-click update. The Adobe panels refresh themselves from the app every time it starts, so they can never drift out of step with it.

The extra click

Adobe only auto-installs plugins that Adobe itself has signed. Photoshop and Premiere use that newer plugin system, so their panel loads through Adobe's free UXP Developer Tool (available in Creative Cloud).

Moskito Easy MCP adds the plugin to that tool for you — you press Load next to it once. Illustrator and After Effects use the older system, which has no such restriction, so those are fully automatic.

Using it

Open the MCP panel inside the Adobe app and leave it open:

• Illustrator / After Effects → Window → Extensions → Moskito Easy MCP

• Photoshop → Plugins → Moskito Easy MCP

• Premiere Pro → Window → Moskito Easy MCP

Then just ask:

"Make me a 1080×1080 Instagram post with a bold headline and our brand colours." "Rename every layer in this file to a consistent format." "Build a rough cut from these clips with cross dissolves between them."

About ChatGPT

The ChatGPT desktop app, Codex CLI and the Codex IDE extension all run local MCP servers and share one config file, so Moskito Easy MCP connects all three at once. These tools live in the Codex surface, not a plain ChatGPT chat — asking a normal chat window about them will get you "no Adobe Illustrator MCP server appears".

One extra step for ChatGPT and Codex. They run MCP servers in a sandbox with networking switched off, so the Adobe servers can't reach the app on localhost and every request fails as "cancelled". Press Allow on the ChatGPT row in Moskito Easy MCP. That sets network_access = true under [sandbox_workspace_write] in ~/.codex/config.toml — which also lets other Codex tools reach the network, so it's your call. Claude Desktop doesn't sandbox its MCP servers and needs nothing.

ChatGPT in a browser tab cannot — its connectors only reach servers on the public internet, so they can't see an app on your Mac. Use the desktop app.

Build it yourself

git clone https://github.com/Neurone00/mcp-easyinstall.git
cd mcp-easyinstall
./build.sh --zip

build.sh downloads Node, uv and the adb-mcp engine, lipos both architectures together and packs them into dist/Moskito Easy MCP.app. The result is universal: the same build runs on Apple Silicon and Intel, whichever Mac you build it on. The build refuses to continue if any bundled binary is not universal.

Signing

Run ./scripts/setup-signing.sh once on the build machine. It creates a self-signed code-signing certificate so the app has a stable identity across rebuilds.

This matters for one specific reason: macOS Accessibility permission (used by Arrange windows) is matched against the app's code identity. With an ad-hoc signature that identity is the binary's hash, so every update silently invalidated the permission the user had already granted.

It is not Apple notarisation — the Privacy & Security step on first open stays. The certificate lives only on the build machine; people who receive the app install nothing, because the signature travels inside the .app.

When the first build asks for your keychain password, click Always Allow. Clicking Allow makes it ask on every build.

How it fits together

Claude / Codex  ──MCP──▶  Moskito Easy MCP  ──socket.io──▶  panel inside the Adobe app
                          (hub.js, port 3001)

hub.js is both the control panel you see and the command proxy the Adobe panels connect to. The MCP servers themselves are Python, run through a bundled uv.

What it can do

CAPABILITIES.md lists every tool in both apps, and — just as importantly — what Adobe's scripting API cannot reach, so nothing gets promised that can't be delivered.

Illustrator tools

Upstream exposes five tools, only one of which can change artwork, so every action made the model write an ExtendScript program — expensive, error-prone, and the reason simple requests showed up as hundreds of "lines of code" in usage dashboards.

Moskito Easy MCP adds thirteen more, built at build time and dispatched through the existing script bridge (the panel needs no changes):

get_instructions, list_artboards, list_items, create_rectangle, create_ellipse, create_text, create_artboard, set_fill, move_item, resize_item, align_item, duplicate_item, delete_item.

Coordinates are pixels from the top-left of an artboard, y downward — not Illustrator's y-up document space — with center=true to skip the maths. Colours are hex; CMYK documents are converted automatically. execute_extend_script remains for anything the tools don't cover.

After Effects still has only execute_extend_script, but now ships real guidance telling the model so, with orientation and undo-group advice.

Credits

The engine that actually talks to the Adobe apps is adb-mcp by Mike Chambers (MIT) — downloaded at build time, not vendored here. This project adds the one-click installer, the control panel, and the connection to Claude and ChatGPT.

Neither project is endorsed by or supported by Adobe.

MIT licensed.

Known limitation

codex exec — the non-interactive Codex CLI — cannot run these tools. It reports user cancelled MCP tool call because it runs with approvals disabled and has no way to grant one. The same request works from any interactive client: the ChatGPT desktop app, the Codex TUI, Claude Desktop, or Claude Code. Only scripted codex exec runs are affected.