Plonk

<p align="center"> <img src="docs/banner.gif" width="640" alt="The Plonk cube drops a window into the second of four gradient-filled zones, which frames it with a visible gap"> </p> <h1 align="center">Plonk</h1> <p align="center"><strong>Give every window a place to live. Draw the boxes you actually want, then drop windows into them — with a drag, a key, or by saying so out loud.</strong><br> _{To plonk is to set a thing down exactly where it belongs.}</p> <p align="center"> <img alt="Version" src="https://img.shields.io/github/v/release/ostapondo/Plonk?style=flat-square&color=8b5cf6&label=version"> <img alt="macOS 13+" src="https://img.shields.io/badge/macOS-13%2B-3a6bff?style=flat-square"> <img alt="Swift 6" src="https://img.shields.io/badge/Swift-6-ff4f81?style=flat-square"> <img alt="No dependencies" src="https://img.shields.io/badge/dependencies-0-12d3a4?style=flat-square"> <img alt="MIT" src="https://img.shields.io/badge/license-MIT-ffc531?style=flat-square"> <img alt="MCP" src="https://img.shields.io/badge/MCP-20_tools-8b5cf6?style=flat-square"> </p> <p align="center"> <a href="https://ostapondo.github.io/Plonk/"><strong>ostapondo.github.io/Plonk</strong></a> </p>

Why another one

You most likely already have Rectangle, Magnet, Loop or Raycast. If a fixed grid of halves and thirds is all you want, they do it well. Plonk is for three things they do not do.

Coming from one of them costs nothing: the ten placement shortcuts are the same keys, one button takes the rest, and an existing rectangle:// script is one substitution away. Coming from Rectangle is the whole of it.

Zones you draw. Not a preset grid. Any number of zones, any size, a different set per monitor, overlapping if that suits you. Click a zone to split it, ⇧-click to split the other way: a narrow rail for chat, a wide middle split in two, a strip for the terminal.

Workspaces that remember which monitor. Save the desk: the apps, every window's frame, and the display each one belongs on. Launch it onto an empty desktop and it rebuilds itself, on the right screens.

An agent can drive all of it. Plonk ships an MCP server that covers its whole surface: layouts, workspaces, zones, keep-awake, screenshots, on-device OCR, measuring. Generic macOS automation servers can nudge a window around. This is the window manager itself, so "browser on the left 60%, terminal top right, save that as a workspace called review" is one sentence rather than a script.

The other seven tools, OCR and a ruler and keep-awake among them, are there because each was otherwise its own icon in the menu bar.

It is early. Version 0.2.x, one author. Shortcuts, zone files and workspaces are settled. The MCP tool names and the HTTP API are not, and can still change between minor versions. CHANGELOG.md says what moved.

Three ways to move a window

<p align="center"> <img src="docs/ways.svg" width="720" alt="Four cards, one per way to move a window: drag it and the zones light up, hold ⌘ for two at once; ⌃⌥1 to ⌃⌥9 for the numbered zones with ⌃⌥0 as the oops key; ⌃⌥V to say it, offline and on-device; or ask an agent, through twenty MCP tools"> </p>

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

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

Say it. Hold ⌃⌥V and name the place: "snap this left", "zone three". That runs in the app, offline, on-device.

Five zone sets ship with it, and past those you draw your own. Swap the set on a screen and any window already in a numbered zone moves to wherever that number is now.

<p align="center"> <img src="docs/zone-swap.svg" width="720" alt="The same screen under two zone sets. In the first, zone 1 is a narrow left rail, zone 2 the wide middle, zone 3 the right column; after ⌃⌥⇧2 the shape is different but the numbers are not, so the window in zone 2 is still in zone 2"> </p>

Colour is the zone number, everywhere it is drawn: 1 rose, 2 plum, 3 blue, 4 mint, 5 sun, 6 sky. In the overlay you drag into, in the editor, in the menu bar, and in every picture on this page. A set can be read before a digit is.

Install

macOS 13 or newer, Apple silicon.

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.

Plonk is signed but not notarized, so macOS holds a copy you download by hand. The cask takes care of that for you.

Running it alongside Rectangle or Magnet is fine, as long as their shortcuts do not collide.

<details> <summary>Installing by hand, Intel Macs, tiling managers, and removing it</summary> <br>

Why macOS holds a downloaded copy. The certificate is self-signed rather than an Apple Developer ID, because notarizing needs a paid Apple account and this project does not have one. macOS cannot vouch for who built it, and says so. The cask skips that check by clearing the quarantine flag for you.

That is a check skipped on your behalf, so here is a stronger one to run before you open anything:

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

It prints the commit and the GitHub Actions run that built this exact archive. Apple's stamp would tell you a build passed a malware scan. This tells you the binary came from the source in this repository, with no laptop in between.

Without Homebrew. Download [the latest release][rel], unzip, drop Plonk.app into Applications, then clear the flag yourself, which is all the cask does:

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

Or do the Gatekeeper detour once: open Plonk, dismiss the warning, then System Settings, Privacy & Security, scroll to Security, Open Anyway.

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

On an Intel Mac. Releases are built for Apple silicon only, so the download will not run. Building from source ought to work, see Build, but nobody has tried it and a report either way is welcome in [issues][hw].

Next to a tiling manager. yabai and Amethyst own every window on screen and will pull windows straight back out of a zone. Run one or the other.

Removing it. brew uninstall --cask plonk, or quit Plonk and drag it to the trash. Then delete ~/Library/Application Support/Plonk/. The login item goes with the app, and nothing was written anywhere else.

</details>

What you get

The window manager is four things, and this is the part of each that the sections above left out.

| | | | --- | --- | | Zones | Overlap them, gap them, hide the numbers, keep a list of apps Plonk never touches. Windows return to their zone after a display is unplugged and plugged back in | | Workspaces | Files, folders or URLs each app should open on the way up, so a desk comes back with the right documents and not just the right apps. Monitors are keyed by UUID, so unplugging one does not scramble them | | Focus that follows the layout | ⌃⌥⇧← goes to the window actually on the left, not the one you used last. ⌃⌥` cycles the windows stacked in one zone | | Voice | Hold ⌃⌥V and say it. Common commands run in the app, offline. Anything bigger goes to your agent. Recognition is on-device |

And the MCP server, which is every one of these as a tool an agent can call.

<details> <summary>Seven smaller things, behind the same menu bar icon</summary> <br>

| | | | --- | --- | | Text off the screen | ⌃⌥T selects an area and copies the words in it: a screenshot, a paused video, a dialog that will not let you select. On-device | | A ruler | ⌃⌥R, then hover: how far the pointer can go each way before it meets an edge, read off the pixels. The width of a row, the height of a bar, the gap between two things. Drag for a straight-line distance. Points and pixels both | | Pin part of the screen | Float a live crop above everything else. A build log, a chart, a call, visible in a corner while you work over it | | Keep awake | Real power assertions, not a jiggler. Sessions end by themselves: after N minutes, at a wall-clock time, or when a process exits | | Screenshots | Region, window or screen, then pen, arrow, rectangle, ellipse, highlighter. Saved at native resolution | | A shortcut guide | Every shortcut the front app actually has, read from its own menus, so it is never out of date | | Pointer tools | Find the cursor, ring every click for a recording, crosshairs, jump to the next display |

</details>

Longer versions: Zones · Workspaces · Hotkeys · Everything else · Coming from Rectangle

For agents

An agent can read the desk, rearrange it, save the result, and read text back off the screen, with no screenshot round trip for anything that is really just words.

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
how tall is that toolbar, in points and in pixels

Twenty tools across state, layouts, workspaces, zones, keep-awake, screenshots, on-device OCR and measuring. Frames are fractions of a monitor's visible area, origin top-left, so "left 60%" is {x: 0, y: 0, w: 0.6, h: 1}. Several agents can connect at once, each registering itself, with an optional mode that locks changes to the active one.

<p align="center"> <img src="docs/agent-desk.svg" width="720" alt="A sentence typed to an agent becomes a desk: the browser takes the left 0.6 of the screen, the terminal the top right and the notes the bottom right, and the result is saved as a workspace called review"> </p>

Setup, 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 be a plugin: 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

For Claude Desktop there is nothing to type. Download plonk-<version>.mcpb from the [latest release][rel] and open it. The bundle carries the server and its dependencies, so no config file is edited and nothing is fetched at launch.

Any MCP client works, over stdio or HTTP. One-pagers for Cursor, Zed and Cline.

The same package carries a plonk command, for the things that are neither an agent nor a settings window:

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 into the clipboard
plonk measure 0.5 0.5            # size of what is mid-screen, in points and pixels

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

Privacy

No account, no cloud, no telemetry. 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 outbou