Chops

Your AI skills and agents, finally organized.

Download · Website · @Shpigford

One macOS app to discover, organize, and edit coding agent skills and agents across Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Windsurf, and Amp. Stop digging through dotfiles.

Features

• Multi-tool support — Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Windsurf, Copilot, Aider, Amp
• Skills + Agents — Discovers both skills and agents from each tool's directories
• Built-in editor — Monospaced editor with Cmd+S save, frontmatter parsing
• Collections — Organize skills and agents without modifying source files
• Real-time file watching — FSEvents-based, instant updates on disk changes
• Full-text search — Search across name, description, and content
• Create new skills & agents — Generates correct boilerplate per tool
• Remote servers — Connect to servers running OpenClaw, Hermes, or other layouts to discover, browse, and install skills
• Skills Discovery — Browse, search, and install skills directly from the skills.sh registry

Supported Tools

Chops scans these directories for skills and agents:

Copilot and Aider are also supported but only detect project-level skills and agents (no global paths). Custom scan paths can be added for any tool.

Tool definitions live in Chops/Models/ToolSource.swift — each enum case knows its display name, icon, color, and filesystem paths.

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Running from source

Build and run Chops locally with the steps below. End users can download the latest release instead.

Prerequisites

• macOS 15 (Sequoia) or later
• Xcode with command-line tools (xcode-select --install)
• Homebrew (brew.sh)
• xcodegen — brew install xcodegen

Sparkle (auto-update framework) is the only external dependency and is pulled automatically by Xcode via Swift Package Manager. No manual setup needed.

Quick Start

git clone https://github.com/Shpigford/chops.git
cd chops
brew install xcodegen    # skip if already installed
xcodegen generate        # generates Chops.xcodeproj from project.yml
open Chops.xcodeproj     # opens in Xcode

Then hit Cmd+R to build and run.

Note: The Xcode project is generated from project.yml. If you change project.yml, re-run xcodegen generate. Don't edit the .xcodeproj directly.

CLI build (no Xcode GUI)

xcodebuild -scheme Chops -configuration Debug build

Contributing

Want to change the app? The sections below cover project layout, architecture, and common tasks.

Project Structure

Chops/
├── App/
│   ├── ChopsApp.swift        # @main entry — SwiftData ModelContainer + Sparkle
│   ├── AppState.swift         # @Observable singleton — filters, selection, search
│   └── ContentView.swift      # Three-column NavigationSplitView, kicks off scanning
├── Models/
│   ├── Skill.swift            # @Model — a discovered skill or agent file
│   ├── Collection.swift       # @Model — user-created skill groupings
│   └── ToolSource.swift       # Enum of supported tools, their paths and icons
├── Services/
│   ├── SkillScanner.swift     # Probes tool directories, upserts skills into SwiftData
│   ├── SkillParser.swift      # Dispatches to FrontmatterParser or MDCParser
│   ├── FileWatcher.swift      # FSEvents listener, triggers re-scan on changes
│   └── SearchService.swift    # In-memory full-text search
├── Utilities/
│   ├── FrontmatterParser.swift  # Extracts YAML frontmatter from .md files
│   └── MDCParser.swift          # Parses Cursor .mdc files
├── Views/
│   ├── Sidebar/               # Tool filters, skills/agents lists, collections
│   ├── Detail/                # Skill editor, metadata display
│   ├── Settings/              # Preferences & update UI
│   └── Shared/                # Reusable components (ToolBadge, NewSkillSheet)
├── Resources/                 # Asset catalog (tool icons, colors)
└── Chops.entitlements         # Disables sandbox (intentional)

project.yml          # xcodegen config — source of truth for Xcode project settings
scripts/             # Release pipeline (release.sh)
site/                # Marketing website (Astro 6)

Architecture

SwiftUI + SwiftData, native macOS with zero web views.

App lifecycle

1. ChopsApp initializes a SwiftData ModelContainer (persists Skill and SkillCollection)
2. Sparkle updater starts in the background
3. AppState is created and injected into the SwiftUI environment
4. ContentView renders and calls startScanning()
5. SkillScanner probes all tool directories and upserts discovered skills
6. FileWatcher attaches FSEvents listeners — on any change, the scanner re-runs automatically

Key design decisions

• No sandbox. The app needs unrestricted filesystem access to read dotfiles across ~/. This is intentional and required for core functionality. The entitlements file explicitly disables the app sandbox.
• Dedup via symlinks. Skills are uniquely identified by their resolved symlink path. If the same file is symlinked into multiple tool directories, it shows up as one skill with multiple tool badges.
• No test suite. Validate changes manually — build, run, trigger the feature you changed, observe the result.

State management

AppState is an @Observable class that holds all UI state: selected tool filter, selected skill, search text, sidebar filter mode. It's injected via @Environment and accessible from any view.

UI layout

Three-column NavigationSplitView:

• Sidebar — tool filters and collections
• List — filtered/searched skill list
• Detail — skill editor (wraps NSTextView for native text editing with Cmd+S save)

Common Dev Tasks

Add support for a new tool

1. Add a new case to the ToolSource enum in Chops/Models/ToolSource.swift
2. Fill in displayName, iconName, color, and globalPaths
3. Optionally add a logo to the asset catalog and return it from logoAssetName
4. Update SkillScanner if the new tool uses a non-standard file layout

Modify skill parsing

• Frontmatter (.md) — edit Chops/Utilities/FrontmatterParser.swift
• Cursor .mdc files — edit Chops/Utilities/MDCParser.swift
• Dispatch logic — edit Chops/Services/SkillParser.swift (decides which parser to use)

Change the UI

Views are in Chops/Views/, organized by column (Sidebar, Detail) and shared components. The main layout is in Chops/App/ContentView.swift.

Testing

No automated test suite. Validate manually:

1. Build and run the app (Cmd+R)
2. Trigger the exact feature you changed
3. Observe the result — check for correct behavior and error messages
4. Test edge cases (empty states, missing directories, malformed files)

AI Agent Setup

This repo includes a Claude Code skill at .claude/skills/setup.md that gives AI coding agents full context on the project — architecture, key files, and common tasks. If you're using Claude Code, it'll pick this up automatically.

Website

The marketing site lives in site/ and is built with Astro.

cd site
npm install      # first time only
npm run dev      # local dev server
npm run build    # production build → site/dist/

License

FSL-1.1-MIT — see LICENSE.