plonk-mcp

One app instead of eight menu bar icons

Plonk is a small suite of macOS tools that share one interface, one command palette and one automation surface. Use all of it, or switch off every module you do not need.

Capture and understand the screen. Take a region, window or full-screen screenshot, annotate it, pin a live crop, copy otherwise unselectable text with on-device OCR, or measure an interface in points and pixels.

Keep the Mac and your workflow moving. Hold sleep off until a timer, time of day or process exit; find the pointer, add crosshairs or click rings; inspect the front app's real shortcuts; and run anything by name from one palette.

Arrange the desk. Draw snap zones, save workspaces that remember each monitor, move windows by drag, shortcut or voice, and let app rules put new windows where they belong.

Let an agent use the same tools. Plonk ships an MCP server and CLI for layouts, workspaces, screenshots, OCR, measuring, keep-awake and the rest. The app stays the source of truth, and the whole surface remains on your Mac.

It is early. Version 0.4.x, one author. Shortcuts, zone files and workspaces are settled. The MCP tool names and the HTTP API are not, and can still change between minor versions. CHANGELOG.md says what moved.

Related MCP server: macos-desktop-control

Install

macOS 13 or newer, Apple silicon.

brew install --cask ostapondo/plonk/plonk

Grant Accessibility when it asks, then relaunch. Screen Recording is asked for separately, the first time you capture. Nothing else: no Full Disk Access, no Automation, no Keychain.

Plonk is signed but not notarized, so macOS holds a copy you download by hand. The cask takes care of that for you.

Running it alongside Rectangle or Magnet is fine, as long as their shortcuts do not collide.

Checking what you downloaded. Notarizing an app means paying Apple for a developer account, and this project does not have one, so Plonk is signed with a certificate it made itself. That means macOS cannot tell you who built the app. There is a check that answers a more useful question, and you can run it yourself: was this exact file built by GitHub from the source in this repository?

gh attestation verify Plonk-<version>.zip --repo ostapondo/Plonk

Put the number from the file name in place of <version>. The command comes with the GitHub CLI, which is brew install gh. It prints the commit and the workflow run that built the archive. If the file was altered after it was built, or was not built from this repository at all, the command fails and tells you so.

Every release also carries a small Plonk-<version>.zip.sha256 file. Put it beside the zip and run shasum -a 256 -c Plonk-<version>.zip.sha256 to confirm the download arrived complete and unchanged. That file is signed the same way as the zip, so gh attestation verify works on it too. The attestation itself is also on the release as Plonk-<version>.zip.sigstore.json, for anyone who wants to check it offline with gh attestation verify --bundle or with cosign instead of asking GitHub.

Why macOS holds a downloaded copy. The certificate is self-signed rather than an Apple Developer ID, because notarizing needs a paid Apple account and this project does not have one. macOS cannot vouch for who built it, and says so. The cask skips that check by clearing the quarantine flag for you.

That is a check skipped on your behalf, so here is a stronger one to run before you open anything:

gh attestation verify $(brew --cache)/downloads/*--Plonk-*.zip \
  -R ostapondo/plonk

It prints the commit and the GitHub Actions run that built this exact archive. Apple's stamp would tell you a build passed a malware scan. This tells you the binary came from the source in this repository, with no laptop in between.

Without Homebrew. Download the latest release, unzip, drop Plonk.app into Applications, then clear the flag yourself, which is all the cask does:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Plonk.app

Or do the Gatekeeper detour once: open Plonk, dismiss the warning, then System Settings, Privacy & Security, scroll to Security, Open Anyway.

If you move or rename Plonk.app later, macOS ties the old grant to the old path and windows of newly launched apps stop being seen. Remove Plonk from Privacy & Security, Accessibility, and grant it again.

On an Intel Mac. Releases are built for Apple silicon only, so the download will not run. Building from source ought to work, see Build, but nobody has tried it and a report either way is welcome in issues.

Next to a tiling manager. yabai and Amethyst own every window on screen and will pull windows straight back out of a zone. Run one or the other.

Removing it. brew uninstall --cask plonk, or quit Plonk and drag it to the trash. Then delete ~/Library/Application Support/Plonk/. The login item goes with the app, and nothing was written anywhere else.

The tools

The modules share settings, shortcuts, the menu bar, the command palette and the same local API. Turning one off removes its page, menu items, shortcuts, manager and agent routes while keeping its settings for later.

All but the shortcut guide can be switched off, from Tools in the menu bar dropdown or the Tools page. Off means gone: out of the sidebar, out of the menu, its shortcuts released, and its tools refused to agents until it is back on. The same switches cover zones, workspaces and voice, so desk arrangement can stand down while the rest of Plonk keeps running.

If you are coming from Rectangle, Magnet, Loop or Raycast, the familiar window shortcuts can come with you. One button imports Rectangle bindings and existing rectangle:// scripts need one substitution. Coming from Rectangle has the details.

Longer versions: Zones · Workspaces · Hotkeys · Everything else · Coming from Rectangle

For agents

An agent gets the same toolbox as the menu bar: capture or read the screen, measure an interface, control an awake session, inspect the desk, arrange it and save the result.

keep the Mac awake until this build finishes
read the error out of that dialog and tell me what it says
how tall is that toolbar, in points and in pixels
capture this window and highlight the warning
put the browser on the left, then save this desk as "review"

Twenty-two tools cover state, capture, OCR, measuring, keep-awake, layouts, workspaces and zones. Several agents can connect at once, each registering itself, with an optional mode that locks changes to the active one.

Setup, if you want the plonk CLI or an agent driving it (Node 18+):

claude mcp add plonk -- npx -y plonk-mcp   # Claude Code
codex mcp add plonk -- npx -y plonk-mcp    # Codex CLI

In Claude Code it can also be a plugin: same server, pinned to the release it shipped with rather than to whatever npm serves as latest.

/plugin marketplace add ostapondo/plonk
/plugin install plonk@plonk

For Claude Desktop there is nothing to type. Download plonk-<version>.mcpb from the latest release and open it. The bundle carries the server and its dependencies, so no config file is edited and nothing is fetched at launch.

Any MCP client works, over stdio or HTTP. One-pagers for Cursor, Zed and Cline.

The same package carries a plonk command, for the things that are neither an agent nor a settings window:

plonk state                      # screens, zone sets, workspaces, windows
plonk launch review              # a saved workspace
plonk awake while npm run build  # awake for exactly as long as the build
plonk text | pbcopy              # OCR a region into the clipboard
plonk measure 0.5 0.5            # size of what is mid-screen, in points and pixels

For agents has every tool, the multi-agent rules, the HTTP transport and the rest of the CLI.

Privacy

No account, no cloud, no telemetry. The API binds to 127.0.0.1, refuses anything carrying headers a browser cannot suppress, and is gated on a token only you can read. The one outbound connection is the update check, which carries no identifier and can be switched off.

None of that is a claim you have to take on trust. Releases are built and signed on GitHub's runners and ship with an attestation, so the binary on your Mac ties back to the commit it came from:

gh attestation verify Plonk-<version>.zip -R ostapondo/plonk

Check it yourself is every claim above with the command that tests it. SECURITY.md says where each promise stops.

Under the hood

• The app is the single source of truth. The MCP server is a stateless bridge.

• App/ is the Swift menu bar app, mcp/ the TypeScript MCP server.

• Config is plain JSON at ~/Library/Application Support/Plonk/config.json.

Build

Seven commands, and they are what CI runs on every pull request. Each line is a subshell, so paste the block from the repository root.

(cd App && swift build)                    # the app compiles
./scripts/test.sh                          # the unit suite
./scripts/lint.sh                          # style rules, no dependencies
(cd mcp && npm ci && npm test)             # the MCP server
node scripts/check-zone-sets.mjs           # the layouts in zone-sets/
node scripts/check-strings.mjs             # every word the user reads
./scripts/check-security-claims.sh         # what SECURITY.md promises

None of that needs a signing certificate. Zone geometry, config decoding, HTTP routing, MCP tools, voice parsing, the CLI and every document here are reachable from that loop, and most changes need nothing more.

Producing a launchable Plonk.app does need one. Make your own once with ./scripts/make-signing-cert.sh, then run ./scripts/build.sh. macOS ties Accessibility and Screen Recording to the code signature, and an ad-hoc one changes every build, so a stable certificate is what stops rebuilds from resetting permissions.

Contributing

Bug reports, zone sets, client one-pagers and code are all welcome. None of them need a signing certificate.

• The smallest useful change is one JSON file. zone-sets/ is a gallery of layouts worth copying: an ultrawide split, a rotated monitor, the one built around a recurring meeting. Draw it in the app, read the numbers out of plonk state --json, open a pull request. That folder has its own CI job and answers in about twenty seconds. No build, no signing, no Swift.

• good first issue issues are written to be picked up cold. Each says where the code is and how to tell it worked, and carries a prompt you can hand to an agent, since AGENTS.md already explains the repo to one.

• needs-hardware is where a request for a desk nobody here has gets tagged, and answering one needs neither Swift nor a certificate. Desk tools meet hardware the author cannot see, so a report from three monitors or an ultrawide is worth more than a patch. An empty list is not a filled gap: open an issue with the arrangement you have and what happened.

CONTRIBUTING.md has the rest, including how long a review takes. Questions and half-formed ideas go to Discussions. A security problem goes through SECURITY.md, not a public issue. Everyone taking part follows the Code of Conduct.

License

MIT © ostapondo