plonk-mcp

Three ways to put a window somewhere

Drag it. Zones light up as you move a window, and it drops into one. Hold ⌘ as well and it takes two of them at once. Turn on grab-and-move and you can pull a window from anywhere inside it, instead of aiming for the title bar.

Press a key. ⌃⌥← for the left half, ⌃⌥1–⌃⌥9 for the numbered zones on that screen, ⌃⌥0 to put a window back exactly where it was before Plonk ever touched it.

Say it. Hold ⌃⌥V and name where it goes — "snap this left", "zone three". That runs inside the app, offline, with on-device recognition. Plonk also speaks MCP, so a whole desk at once can go to an agent you already have open:

browser on the left 60%, terminal top right, notes bottom right

save that as a workspace called "review"

keep the Mac awake until this build finishes

read the error out of that dialog and tell me what it says

Five zone sets ship with it, and past those you cut your own: click a zone to split it, ⇧-click to split it the other way, one set per monitor. Swap the set on a screen and the windows already sitting in a numbered zone go to wherever that number is now.

Everything runs on your Mac. No account, no cloud, no telemetry — and none of that is a promise you have to take, it is all checkable from a terminal.

Related MCP server: computer-use

Install

macOS 13+.

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.

Optional, and only 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 come as a plugin — the 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

Any MCP client works the same way, over stdio or HTTP. For agents has the rest, plus one-pagers for Cursor, Zed and Cline.

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 gets edited and nothing is fetched at launch.

Plonk is signed, but not notarized. The certificate is self-signed rather than an Apple Developer ID, because notarizing one requires a paid Apple account and this project does not have one. So macOS cannot vouch for who built this, and says so: a hand-downloaded copy is held on first launch, and the cask above skips that by clearing the quarantine flag for you.

Worth stating plainly, since it is a check being skipped on your behalf. Here is the one that replaces it, and it is stronger — run it before you open anything:

gh attestation verify $(brew --cache)/downloads/*--Plonk-0.2.2.zip \
  -R ostapondo/plonk

That prints the commit and the GitHub Actions run this exact archive was built by. Apple's stamp would tell you a build passed a malware scan; this tells you the binary on your Mac came from the source in this repository, and nothing went through a laptop on the way. It is the first of several such checks — none of what this README claims about privacy has to be taken on trust.

Without Homebrew: download the latest release, unzip, and drop Plonk.app into Applications. Then either do the Gatekeeper detour once — open Plonk, dismiss the warning, then System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll to Security, Open Anyway — or clear the flag yourself, which is all the cask does:

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

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

What you get

Ten of them. The first three are the window manager, and the rest are the ones that would otherwise each be another icon in the menu bar.

The long version: Zones · Workspaces · Hotkeys · Everything else

For agents

This is the part no other Mac window manager has. Plonk exposes its whole surface over MCP, so an agent can read the desk, rearrange it, save the result and read the screen back — without a screenshot round trip for anything that is really just words. Frames are fractions of a monitor's visible area, origin top-left, which is why "left 60%" is just {x: 0, y: 0, w: 0.6, h: 1}.

Nineteen tools, across state, layouts, workspaces, zones, keep-awake, screenshots and on-device OCR. Several agents can be connected at once, each registering itself, with an optional mode that locks changes to the active one.

The same package carries a plonk command, for the things that are neither an agent nor a settings window — a Makefile, a Raycast script, a shell alias:

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 straight into the clipboard

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

Privacy

Everything runs on your Mac, and none of it is a promise you have to take. 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. Releases are built and signed on GitHub's runners and ship with an attestation, so the binary on your Mac can be tied to the commit it came from:

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

Check it yourself is every one of those claims with the command that tests it, and SECURITY.md is where each of them 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

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

(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/

None of that needs a signing certificate. Zone geometry, config decoding, HTTP routing, MCP tools, voice command parsing, the CLI and every document here are reachable from that loop, and most changes never need more.

Producing a launchable Plonk.app is the one step that does need one. Make your own once with ./scripts/make-signing-cert.sh, then ./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.md has the details; AGENTS.md has the release process, which runs on GitHub's runners and never from a laptop.

Contributing

Bug reports, zone sets, client one-pagers and code are all welcome, and none of them need a signing certificate — the loop above is the whole requirement. CONTRIBUTING.md opens with a first change you can send in about fifteen minutes, and says how long a review takes.

The smallest useful change here 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. Nothing to build, nothing to sign, no Swift.

The issues tagged good first issue are written to be picked up cold — each one says where the code is and how to tell it worked, and carries a prompt you can hand straight to an agent, since AGENTS.md already tells one how this repo is put together. The ones tagged needs-hardware need neither Swift nor a certificate, and are the most useful thing anyone can send: a window manager breaks on arrangements the author cannot see, and a report from three monitors or an ultrawide is worth more than a patch.

Questions, half-formed ideas and layouts worth showing off go to Discussions; a security problem goes through SECURITY.md instead of a public issue. Everyone taking part is expected to follow the Code of Conduct.

License

MIT © ostapondo