Command-line tools, as Mac windows.
Pick a task, drop in a file, turn a few knobs, press Run. The exact command is always on screen.
ffmpeg, yt-dlp, ImageMagick and their friends can do almost anything, if you remember the flags. Knobs puts the everyday jobs behind plain controls, and shows you the real command as you change them. Nothing is hidden, so you learn the tool while you use it.
Get Knobs from knobs.pages.dev or the latest release.
- Mac: open the
.dmgand drag Knobs to Applications. It's signed and notarized by Apple. From 0.2.0 on, Knobs > Check for Updates… keeps it current; it asks before it checks on its own. - Linux: packages for Ubuntu, Fedora and Arch Linux, on x86_64 and ARM. See Linux.
What changed in each version is in CHANGELOG.md.
- Tasks in plain words. "Shrink a video", "Make a PDF searchable", "Remove the location". Drop a file, set what matters, press Run. A large preview with the file's facts, a progress dial, Cancel, and the result with its size change, Open, Show in Finder and drag-out.
- The real command, live. Every change updates the command bar, colored by part, ready to copy into Terminal.
- Three layers per tool. The tasks; an Extra arguments box on every task for anything else; and All options, every option the tool lists in its help, searchable, with a switch or field for each.
- Add any tool. Type the name of any command-line tool on your Mac and get an All options window for it.
- Remembers you. Settings stick per task, presets save the combinations you reuse, recent runs are one click away, and ⌘K reaches every task of every tool.
- Safe by design. Tools run as an argument list, never through a shell, so a strange file name is just a file name. Knobs never overwrites an existing file; it adds " 2", " 3" instead.
| Tool | Tasks |
|---|---|
| ffmpeg | Shrink a video, Convert a video, Trim a clip, Extract the audio, Make a GIF, Remove the sound |
| yt-dlp | Download a video, Download just the audio, Download a whole playlist, Get the subtitles, Save the thumbnail |
| ImageMagick | Resize, Convert, Compress, Make it square, Add a text watermark, Rotate or flip |
| pandoc | Markdown to Word, Word to Markdown, Markdown to a web page, Make an ebook |
| ExifTool | Show hidden details, Remove all hidden details, Remove the location, Rename photos by date taken |
| OCRmyPDF | Make a PDF searchable, Straighten and clean a scan, Redo the text layer |
| Ghostscript | Compress a PDF, Merge PDFs, Convert to black and white, Extract pages |
| whisper.cpp | Transcribe to text, Make subtitles, Translate to English |
| rsync | Copy a folder, Mirror a folder, Compare two folders, Back up a folder |
| 7-Zip | Create an archive, Create a password-protected archive, Extract an archive, Check an archive |
| qpdf | Rotate pages, Pick and reorder pages, Split a PDF, Protect with a password, Remove a password, Repair a damaged PDF |
| img2pdf | Turn images into a PDF |
| Poppler | Save a page as an image, Save every page as images (pdftoppm), Turn a PDF into text (pdftotext) |
Knobs doesn't install tools. If one is missing, it shows the brew install command to copy.
Each tool is a JSON manifest in Manifests/, in the format documented in docs/MANIFEST_FORMAT.md. Adding a tool or a task needs no Swift; see CONTRIBUTING.md.
macOS 26 or later on an Apple Silicon Mac, and the tools you want to use (Homebrew is the easy way).
You need Xcode 26 or later and XcodeGen (brew install xcodegen).
scripts/install-hooks.sh
scripts/ci.sh
scripts/run-app.shAll checks run locally on your Mac. This project uses no hosted CI.
The Linux version, in GTK 4 and libadwaita, shares the manifests and the core with the Mac app, so tasks, commands and remembered settings behave the same. It needs GTK 4.20 or later: Ubuntu 26.04, Fedora 43, current Arch Linux or newer. Download the package for your distribution and processor from the latest release, then install it from the folder it's in:
- Ubuntu:
sudo apt install ./knobs_*.deb - Fedora:
sudo dnf install ./knobs-*.rpm - Arch Linux (x86_64):
sudo pacman -U ./knobs-*.pkg.tar.zst. An AUR package,knobs-gui-bin, will follow once the AUR opens registration again. - Other distributions:
tar -xzf knobs-*-linux-*.tar.gz && knobs/usr/bin/knobs. GTK 4.20 or later and libadwaita must already be installed.
apt, dnf and pacman install GTK and libadwaita if they're missing. Then open Knobs from your apps.
On Fedora, Shrink a video works with Fedora's own ffmpeg-free, but its Quality setting only takes effect with
the full ffmpeg from RPM Fusion, which has the x264 encoder.
The source is in linux/. To build and try it in a container on a Mac with OrbStack or Docker:
scripts/linux.sh build
scripts/linux.sh runThen open http://localhost:8085. scripts/linux.sh package <version> [arm64|amd64] writes a .deb, an .rpm and a .tar.gz to dist/linux/; the amd64 run also writes an Arch Linux package (knobs-gui-bin) and its AUR files.
See SECURITY.md for how Knobs runs tools safely, its known limits, and how to report a problem.
MIT. See LICENSE. The tools Knobs runs belong to their authors and keep their own licenses. The Mac app includes Sparkle for updates; its license is in App/Acknowledgements/Sparkle-LICENSE.txt and inside the app.