Substage

Command line power, natural language ease
Finder screenshot
Convert, organize and more: control your
Mac and its files with natural language.
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Requires macOS 15 Sequoia or newer

Substage is a command bar that docks underneath your Finder window.

Tell it what you want to happen, and it takes action:

convert to 1080p mp4
make a jpg please
author of this pdf?
Make a new readme.txt
make a new index.html
resize this to 1080 px tall
What processor does this Mac have?
put in screenshots folder, zip em up!
switch to dev branch
open in Text Mate
convert this doc to rtf
word count?
5 foot 9 in cm?
total lines of JavaScript?
is this JPG actually a PNG?
what bitrate is this video?

How it works

Substage converts natural language prompts into command line commands.

1

Select files, enter prompt

Just tell Substage what you want to do with the files you have selected.

Make a jpg plz
2

Substage generates a command

Using an AI model such as GPT-4o, it creates a command to be run on your Mac’s terminal.

sips -s format jpeg ocean.png —out ocean.jpg
3

Confirm if necessary

Substage evaluates the risk of running the command and might require confirmation to proceed. You can sanity check the command if you'd like.

4

Command is run

Any output is boiled down into a summary of what happened.

Converted successfully!

Pricing

Substage is free to try for 2 weeks.

Free trial

$0.00

  • 2 week free trial
  • Mini AI model

Monthly

$7.99

  • Access to all features
  • High end AI models

Yearly

$79.99

  • Access to all features
  • High end AI models

Privacy and AI

Substage is designed to help you work with files and folders on your Mac more efficiently by translating natural language into terminal commands. To do this, we send your prompt, along with some contextual information, to AI providers such as OpenAI.

One key thing to be aware of is that, by default, Substage also sends the paths of the files and folders you’re working with. This helps the AI make smarter decisions—like suggesting a zip file should be named “screenshots.zip” if you’re selecting multiple files named “screenshot1.jpg” and “screenshot2.jpg.” However, we understand that even sending file names is a privacy concern, and we’re exploring ways to limit this. In the future, we’d like to provide an option where only file extensions (like .jpg or .txt) are shared, while actual names remain local.

Substage does not aim to access or send the content of your files. However, there is a potential exception: when summarizing the output of commands, some file content could appear in the output. For example, if you run a command that prints a file’s contents to the terminal, and you ask Substage to summarize that output, the AI provider will process the contents of the file. We don’t process or store this data ourselves, but it’s something to keep in mind.

We've carefully selected our AI providers based on their privacy policies. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Mistral all have similar privacy commitments: they retain data for only 30 days and solely for abuse detection purposes, not for training their models. We've chosen not to integrate with Google Gemini because their privacy policy is not quite as clear.

We'd love to support offline AI models in the future so that your data never has to leave your machine—but we haven't explored this yet. Our goal is to strike the right balance between utility and privacy, and we'll aim to keep improving as we go.

We'd love to hear your feedback or suggestions on how to improve this further!

Updates and Features

Things to try

Looking for ideas? Here are some more example commands to try.

Video and audio

These make use of the bundled ffmpeg and ffprobe tools.

  • Convert to mp4
  • mp4 - this can work too!
  • Convert to mp4, 1080p, 30fps, 1000kbit/s
  • Make a gif from this video, 600 pixels wide, 12fps
  • what bitrate is this video?

Images

  • Make a jpg or simply: jpg!
  • Rotate this image right by 90 degrees
  • Batch resize all images in this folder to 1024 pixels wide
  • resize this to 1080 px tall
  • is this file with a .jpg extension actually a PNG?

Calculations

  • 5 foot 9 in cm?
  • 1 day in seconds?
  • 15% of $85.99?
  • Convert 42 USD to EUR
  • What's the square root of 1764?

Documents

  • Zip these up or simply: zip
  • Convert this docx to html
  • put in screenshots folder, zip em up!
  • open in Text Mate
  • author of this pdf?
  • Make a new readme.txt
  • word count?

File Metadata

  • What type of file is this?
    Check file type, MIME type, or why a file might be corrupted
  • Where did I download this file from?
    Get file metadata including creation date and source
  • Why is this file greyed out in Finder?
    Check quarantine attributes and permissions

Web

  • Download this file here: (and paste a URL)

Code and version control

  • total lines of JavaScript?
  • Commit and push everything
  • switch to dev branch

System & Utilities

  • Toggle dark mode - the first time you run this, it will request permission
  • What processor does this Mac have?
  • How much RAM do I have?

Other

  • pwd - directly typing in commands can work too!
  • Send this using the Messages app to "[email protected]" - perhaps not the most convenient way to send a file, but it works, if you get the full Apple Account name correct! It will request permission the first time you run it.

Anything else I should add to this list? Let me know!