Plip

Personal staff that lives in your MacBook's notch. Hold Control+Option and talk. Plip looks at your screen, explains things step by step, and does the busywork for you: finds files, tidies your desktop, pulls up flights, sets reminders, rewrites your text. It thinks with the Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor or Gemini plan you already pay for.

"how do I send this deck as a PDF?" → a five-step checklist drops out of the notch, and Plip slips out of the notch to point at the next click. Plip watches your screen and checks each step off as you go.

"tidy up my desktop" → "I'll sort your desktop into folders. Here's the plan." A card shows what goes where. Say "yes" or click Tidy up, and "undo" puts it all back.

Anything that moves your files shows you a preview first, and nothing happens until you say yes.

Download

⬇ Download Plip for Mac (.dmg): free and open source. macOS 13+, Apple Silicon.

1. Open the .dmg and drag Plip into Applications.

2. Open Plip from Applications. If macOS says it can't check it for malicious software, go to System Settings → Privacy & Security and click Open Anyway (only the first time).

3. Sign in with Google once: your account is your name and email, nothing you do with Plip (what it holds).

4. A short welcome walks you through it: allow Screen Recording, Accessibility and Microphone, then click Connect AI. Done.

5. Hold Control+Option, ask something, let go.

Something broken? Click Report a bug in Plip's menu bar (or Settings → General), or open a GitHub issue.

Related MCP server: open-computer-use

Quick start (from source)

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hussainn7/plip-oss/main/scripts/install.sh | bash
plip                 # Plip moves into your notch; the dashboard opens on first run

Pick a brain under Brain. If you're already signed in to one of these, Plip finds it and uses your plan:

Plip runs the CLI once per question in an empty scratch folder with its own tools switched off, so the model only ever sends back words and Plip's action tags. Plip does the actions itself, and anything that buys, sends or deletes asks you first.

Then hold Control+Option, talk, and let go.

• The island drops out of the notch with a live waveform and your words, then shows what Plip is doing (looked at 2 screens, searched files, snapped to "Export").

• Click ⌃ on the island to minimize it back into the notch; hover to peek.

• Press the shortcut again while Plip is talking to interrupt it.

• Menu bar: Open Plip, Brain, Show Plip by my cursor, Forget this conversation.

Optional extras

Paste them in the dashboard, or see .env.example. plip doctor checks brains, keys and permissions from the terminal.

Listening on your Mac with Parakeet. Under Voice → Listening, pick Parakeet for NVIDIA's Parakeet Unified 0.6B instead of Apple's recognizer: it catches more of what you say, with punctuation, and nothing leaves your Mac. It's a one-time 663 MB download (pinned, checksummed, resumable); Apple's keeps listening until it's done.

Activity. The Activity tab's Usage view shows every request from this Mac: per day, when you ask, how it ended, which brain and plan, and what it would cost at API prices (what your plan is worth). It stays on your Mac.

Permissions in one click. Allow opens the exact page in System Settings with a small card docked under it: drag Plip into the list and it's on.

Try it from the terminal (macOS and Linux)

plip ask --image screenshot.png "where's the export button?"
plip ask --engine codex --json "find my lease pdf"     # prints what Plip said, did, and pointed at

Memory: Plip knows you

Plip keeps a small knowledge panel about you on your Mac, and uses it to answer like someone who knows you. Import it in a few seconds from what's already on your Mac:

• Contacts: your "My Card" (name, emails, phones, address, birthday, company, links)

• Browser autofill: Chrome, Arc, Brave and Edge profiles

• Mail: your accounts and addresses

• ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini memory: copy Plip's prompt into your assistant and paste its answer back. This is the same pattern as Claude's Import Memory.

Everything lives in ~/.config/mcp-vision/memory.json (mode 0600). Passport, card and Social Security numbers are detected, stored privately, and never sent to the model. From the terminal: plip memory import contacts, plip memory show, plip memory prompt.

How it thinks

⌃⌥ ──▶ mic ──▶ AssemblyAI / Apple Speech ──▶ transcript ──▶ notch island (live)
                                               │
 screenshots (prefetched) ─┐                   ▼
 Accessibility screen map ─┼──▶ Jev router (needs screen? which monitor? walkthrough?)
 what Plip knows about you ┘
                           ▼
   your brain (Claude Code / Codex / Cursor / Gemini / API), streamed
     ├─▶ sentences ──▶ TTS queue (speaks sentence 1 while 2 is synthesized)
     ├─▶ [POINT:x,y:label]       ──▶ snap to the real control ──▶ Plip slips out of the notch to it
     ├─▶ [STEPS:n] [PLAN: a | b] ──▶ checklist in the notch; Plip watches the screen and gives the next step
     └─▶ [DO:name {json}]        ──▶ action engine ──▶ preview + your yes (if it moves files) ──▶ done
                                       └──▶ results (search hits, a loaded page) go back for one more turn

• Screen map. Plip lists the frontmost app's real controls (label, role, center in screenshot pixels), so the model points at things that exist, fills the right fields, and text-only brains can still point.

• Walkthroughs. For "how do I…" the model announces the steps, and Plip shows them as a checklist. A 64×40 screen fingerprint tells Plip when you've done a step, and it takes a fresh look before giving the next one.

• Actions. The model asks for actions with [DO:…] tags. Plip runs them itself on your Mac (open, Spotlight, AppleScript, Shortcuts, Accessibility), with timeouts, an undo history, and a local log.

• Depth. Fast, Balanced and Deep map to low, medium and high effort.

Everything above the windows is platform-neutral and tested, including the CLI engines (through real subprocesses) and a full plip CLI run against a fake Claude Code. The macOS layer is three WKWebViews (island, mascot, dashboard) rendering one React bundle, plus an event tap and audio glue. See docs/BUDDY.md.

Development

python3.12 -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e '.[dev]'
ruff check . && python -m pytest

cd ui && npm install && npm run build      # React 19 + Tailwind 4 + Motion → src/mcp_vision/buddy/web/index.html
npm run dev                                # open #showcase for the fake-desktop demo, #settings, #island
npm run e2e                                # clicks through the island and dashboard in Chromium

More in CONTRIBUTING.md.

License

MIT

Updates

Once a day Plip asks GitHub whether a newer release is out (one request to api.github.com, nothing about you in it). When there is one, the notch says so once, and the menu bar, Home and Settings → General offer Download: it opens the new DMG; quit Plip, then drag the new one into Applications. Your settings, memory and sign-in stay. Turn it off in Settings → General → Tell me about new versions.

Your account

The download asks you to sign in with Google once, before anything else. Sign-in goes through Supabase Auth, Plip's account server: Google tells it your name, email address and profile picture, and it keeps your account (name, email, the link to your Google profile picture, when you joined and when you last signed in). That's how we know who uses Plip.

• On this Mac, ~/.config/mcp-vision/account.json (readable only by you) keeps your name, email and the sign-in session. Plip doesn't download or keep your picture.

• Each time Plip starts, it renews the session with Supabase once. If your account was removed, Plip signs out.

• What you ask Plip, your screen, memory and history are never sent to the account server or tied to your account.

• Settings → Account → Sign out forgets the account on this Mac and ends the session. To have the account itself deleted, email team@plip.dev from the address you signed in with (the full policy is at plip.dev/privacy).

Running from source without a sign-in project (the default) never asks you to sign in and never contacts the account server. The code is src/mcp_vision/buddy/account.py.

Analytics

Plip sends one anonymous ping per day (random install id, version, OS) so we can count active users. No screens, files, or prompts are ever sent. Opt out with MCP_VISION_NO_ANALYTICS=1 or DO_NOT_TRACK=1.