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Creative tools moved to the cloud and started charging rent. clipx goes the other way: the editors you reach for every day, in one native app, on your own machine, with an assistant that can drive every one of them.

• One app, four editors. A multi-track video timeline, a layered photo editor, a real PDF editor, and a text/LaTeX editor that compiles as you type.
• An AI that actually edits. It doesn't just chat about your files. It works the same editor you do, and every change it makes is one Command-Z away.
• Private by default. Your library is a folder you choose. Point the assistant at a local model through Ollama or LM Studio and nothing leaves your Mac. Use a hosted one and a ledger shows exactly what was sent.
• Yours to keep. Apache-2.0. No account, no subscription, no watermark.

Just ask

"Trim the silences out of this recording."

"Redact my name from every page of this PDF."

"Why won't my LaTeX build? Fix it."

"Turn this screen recording into a GIF."

"Find the screenshot with the error message in it."

The assistant turns each request into the same edits you'd make by hand, on the same undo stack, so you can watch it work, step back through it, or take over halfway.

Get started in a minute

1. Download clipx-<version>.dmg from Releases and drag clipx to Applications.
2. Pick a folder for your library.
3. Drop in a video, photo, PDF, or text file — or just take a screenshot.

Want the AI fully offline? Install Ollama, then choose your models in clipx → Settings. clipx can install them for you.

What it does

• Video — a multi-track timeline with trim, split, snapping, fades, keyframes, and exact undo. Crop, background framing, rounded corners, shadows, regional blur, and zoom, exported to H.264, HEVC, or ProRes.
• Click track — opt-in, listen-only capture of your clicks during a recording, aligned to the footage and turned into automatic zooms.
• Photos — a layered, non-destructive editor with annotation, crop, padding, Live Text, and redaction that flattens pixels rather than drawing over them.
• PDFs — page and text editing on PDFium, permanent redaction, OCR, and layout-aware Markdown extraction.
• Text and LaTeX — a native editor with syntax highlighting, offline Markdown preview, and confined LaTeX compilation with SyncTeX diagnostics.
• Conversion — a planner that picks a backend per file, with remux, VideoToolbox, ImageIO, and linked LGPL FFmpeg paths.
• Search — on-device indexing with OCR, plus exact and semantic search across your library.
• Assistant — hosted or local models that operate the editor through tool calls, with an inspectable egress ledger and undoable edits.

Install

Download the latest clipx-<version>.dmg from Releases, open it, and drag clipx to Applications.

clipx needs macOS 14 or later on Apple silicon. The bundled FFmpeg framework is arm64-only, so there is no Intel build.

On first launch: if the download is an unsigned build, macOS refuses to open it and offers only Move to Trash. Right-click clipx in Applications and choose Open, then confirm. You only need to do this once. Releases built with Developer ID credentials are notarized and open normally.

clipx asks for a library folder on first launch. Pick somewhere writable; it creates Media, Projects, Exports, and a hidden .reel cache inside.

Build from source

make bootstrap   # one-time toolchain check
make run         # build and launch a Debug copy

To work in Xcode:

make xcode

Re-run make xcode after pulling changes that add, remove, or rename Swift files — clipx.xcodeproj is generated and deliberately not committed, so an open project will not discover them. Keep only clipx.xcodeproj open: the pre-rename Reel.xcodeproj and the individual package workspaces claim the same local packages, and Xcode rejects the duplicate ownership.

To build an installer locally:

make dmg

That produces an ad-hoc signed ReleaseBuild/unsigned/clipx-<version>.dmg with no Apple Developer account required. make release produces the signed and notarized channel and needs Developer ID and App Store Connect credentials; see DISTRIBUTION.md.

Develop

Requires macOS 14+ and a Swift 6 toolchain whose compiler matches its installed macOS SDK.

Start with CLAUDE.md for the invariants that matter, then docs/DESIGN.md for the data model and services.

Project status

clipx is built milestone-by-milestone against the design in docs/. M0–M9 are complete: the model foundation and patch/undo engine, library and index, ingest, shell and workspaces, conversion, composition and playback, effects and export, the event track, the AI layer, and both distribution channels.

Later phases added the multi-track editing foundation, the photo and PDF workspaces, on-device search, the conversion planner, and the text and LaTeX editor.

Known incomplete: track reordering and renaming, true overlapping transitions, and richer source routing in the timeline; forms, comments, signatures, and arbitrary source-object editing in the PDF workspace.

Licence

Apache-2.0. FFmpeg is linked as LGPL-only, built without --enable-gpl, x264, or x265; H.264 and HEVC come from VideoToolbox. Third-party notices are collected in ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.md.