Substage hits version 1.0! Command bar that attaches to Finder windows
Substage is a command prompt bar that attaches to Finder windows, and allows you to perform actions on the items you have selected with natural language. It uses an AI model most of the time, though for hundreds of the most frequent commands don't need to - for example if you type "jpg" with a PNG file selected, it can do so immediately with zero latency. I'm super excited to be releasing version 1.0 today, which includes: Rules - presets that effectively allow you to customise the system prompt - for example tell it "image for my website should be 1000px wide", so that later you can just say "resize for my website" Ideas & Actions - a new panel that gives you quick access to hundreds of commands that are possible with Substage Full UI redesign And much much more - read in my full blog post Problem: Your Mac can run hundreds of powerful command line tools, but many people either don't know how to use them, or don't remember all the command line arguments. Substage allows natural language access to them via AI models, with the addition of a super strong safety model: we pre-parse all Terminal commands in detail and figure out the side effects, so we can confirm anything risky, according to user preference. For example you can write: "1080p mp4" and it will use ffmpeg behind the scenes to transcode a video "jpg" to convert an image "zip" - to zip up files - surprisingly fast and convenient given this skips AI entirely "select all png" - quick filters if you have a large folder of fixed files "blur this image" - access to ImageMagick for lots of powerful image manipulation direct from the Finder "Optimize this PDF" - using the GhostScript Homebrew package Comparison: Nowadays there are loads of agentic tools such Codex, Claude Cowork and soon the new Siri. However, Substage is a little different - it focuses less on agentic work, and more on fast access to single individual actions, rather than agentic workflows. It's also super convenient because it attaches itself to Finder windows, making it feel like an extension of the Finder itself. In general, far less information gets sent up into the cloud with Substage too - it generates a Terminal command which is then run on your own machine with certain caveats as outlined in the privacy section on the website. So on the one hand it can't "compare and generate a report from these three PDFs", but on the other hand it can "extract page 2 of this PDF" in around 1 second. Pricing: Lifetime (Bring Your Own AI version) - $39.99 Subscription: Currently discounted: $18.99 yearly (down from $29.99) $2.99 monthly (down from $3.99) Available on Setapp 2 week trial for paid version Download Substage Here Tier 2: Transparency My real name is Joseph Humfrey (mini personal site with all my links, LinkedIn). My main job is co-founder or indie game developer at inkle which I've been doing since 2011 - we've won an Apple Design Award and were a finalist this year for another called TR-49. We open sourced a narrative scripting language with 4.8k stars on GitHub. Just over a year ago I founded a new app company Selkie Design on the side, and Substage was my first release. It can't go in the Mac App Store because of its use of Accessibility and Apple Events APIs (I double checked with someone from Apple at WWDC this year!) Substage privacy policy Terms of service
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Wow, interesting, is it using accessibility to get your screen, and what is happening there?
Yep! Using accessibility to get the size and position of the active Finder window. And then AppleEvents (basically, the underlying tech behind AppleScript) to find out what is selected in the active Finder window.
Cool app, simple and useful. Quick question: why don't you use Apple Foundation Model? Did you test it for this use case? Is it capable enough to produce proper actions for Substage?
The TL;DR is that the current Apple Foundation Model is waaaaaay too dumb for this use case unfortunately. I tried using it for picking icons for my other app and even that was an uphill struggle. I'd love to integrate the new Foundation Models they announced for macOS 27 but it only works if your app is in the Mac App Store. Meanwhile I found a sneaky hack to integrate Private Cloud Compute via Shortcuts but it was way toooo hacky, so decided not to release.
Loved the idea. Great execution. BTW your portfolio site design is so good as well.
Congrats on the launch! Looks really neat, will give it a try
congrats on 1.0!
thank you!!
Really interested in this, saw an earlier announcement shot it, but I don’t really use Finder. If you could make this work with Qspace I’d be all over it. I’m sure there are other people would be interested with integration with Bloom and Pathfinder for the same reason.
Yeah I've heard from a few people who'd like this. Problem is that it's a niche of a niche, and fragmented into a bunch of different apps - each one would require significant work and testing. I'm definitely open to the idea though - feel free to upvote it in my feature tracker: https://substage.featurebase.app/p/integrate-with-alternative-file-browsers-and-apps
I’ve been a lifetime member since the beta days. It’s really awesome to see how far the app has come and that the investment finally paid off!
The smart move is focusing on quick, single actions instead of trying to be an all-in-one automation tool. Most people need 'resize this image' way more often than complex workflows.
Thank you! Genuinely really makes me feel happy and validated to hear that!
This looks very cool! I wonder how much of a performance hit it costs to have these command bars on every finder window? I can have up to like 20 finder windows open at once.
Substage has a shared window that jumps from window to window so there isn’t one per finder window. But the prompt window is super lightweight anyhow, it’s native and just a text box really!
I love the animation. This feels like Apple Script itself though, because it was plain english you didn’t actually knew what you can do with it. I think you could just add buttons to do all this actions and keep the input command for who wants to waste time typing.
It has a palette of Ideas & Actions to show you what it can do and to let you click to do the commands!
The CJK input issue is worth taking seriously. A lot of apps built around command bars accidentally assume “Enter means submit,” but for Japanese/Chinese/Korean input, Enter may just mean “confirm this conversion.” If the app fires before composition ends, it feels broken even if the English flow is perfect. I’d probably treat IME composition as a core input state, not an edge case. For command-style apps, that one detail decides whether the app feels native outside English.
Impressive! Can I ask you what llm model is powering your software, if there's one?
Curious how you handle command determinism when an AI model is involved. For example, if I type “compress for web”, do I always get the same ffmpeg/ImageMagick flags for a given rule set, or can outputs vary between runs depending on model inference? In this category, consistency matters more than intelligence.
A couple of things: - Before the AI kicks in, I do fuzzy string-matching of your prompt against known requests in thousands of possible permutations, and then add examples in the system prompt to get as close as possible to the canonical ideal answer. So if you ask for an image conversion, it is extremely likely to have an example of what it should look like in the system prompt - Where possible, AI models have temperature set to zero, to make them as deterministic as possible But of course, it can't ever be perfect - a vague/ambiguous prompt will certainly give non-deterministic output
Does Substage support using local models? Would you consider making certain features extensions?
Yep it supports local models by integrating with LM Studio and Ollama. What kind of feature extension do you mean?
Good idea, where does the AI model run? cloud or local? which model(s) being used?
The answer to your questions is “yes” 😉 Default is cloud, and most of the time you get the best experience with smaller faster models (GPT 4.1 Mini, its old now but good for purpose and fast), but you can use it with most models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini and Mistral. Local can also be used via integration with LM Studio or Ollama