Ask Claude Code, Codex or Gemini in the Agent panel, or connect any MCP client. It sees your playhead and selection, works with 110+ editing tools, and every change it makes is yours to undo.
Cue is a fast, open-source video editor for macOS. Cut by hand with the shortcuts you already know, or let Claude Code, Codex or any MCP agent edit right alongside you.
Download for Mac
Free and open source · Apple Silicon · Other platforms · Source
Every demo on this page was recorded in Cue and rendered with Recordly.
Transcribe on your Mac with Whisper, then delete words to cut them from every track at once. Filler words go in one click, and you can search the footage by what is said.
Eleven templates, every font on your Mac, outlines, gradients and motion. Double-click a title in the viewer and type straight into it.
Grade a shot or everything under an adjustment layer, spotlight with feathered masks, key out a green screen, and push in with zooms and keyframes. The preview matches the export.
Level, pan, solo and live meters per track, music that ducks under the voice, and beat detection that drops markers and snaps your cuts to the music.
Keep several timelines in one project and nest clips into their own sequence, like in Premiere. Open it, change it, and the nested clip follows.
Projects are plain .cueproj files with a complete history of every change, and Cue finds your media again when it moves.
Shortcuts you already know
J/K/L, blade, slip, roll, ripple, insert and overwrite, lift and extract: Premiere's keys, so nothing is new.
Fast and light
Proxies, frame-accurate playback and hardware encoding keep it snappy on a laptop.
AI on your Mac, or in the cloud
Local Whisper, macOS voices, Ollama and LM Studio, or OpenAI with your own key.
Built for agents
One contract powers the UI and the MCP server, with a written guide every agent receives.
Works with other editors
Round-trip OpenTimelineIO, and export FCPXML, Shotcut MLT and EDL for Resolve, Final Cut and more.
Complete history
Every change is kept across sessions, with who made it. Go back to any point at any time.
Voiceover booth
Record takes against a teleprompter line by line, or generate a voice, and keep the best take.
Free and open source
MIT licensed, no accounts and no watermarks. Your footage never leaves your Mac unless you choose a cloud model.
Connect your agent in one line
Pick your agent. Or skip it: the Agent panel inside Cue runs the CLIs you already have.
claude mcp add --scope user cue -- node "/Applications/Cue.app/Contents/Resources/mcp/cue-mcp.mjs"
Run once in a terminal; Cue is then available in every folder.
Yes. Cue is free and open source under the MIT license, with no accounts, limits or watermarks.
The Agent panel runs Claude Code, Codex or Gemini CLI if you have them installed, signed in with your own account, with access to Cue's tools only. Any other MCP client can connect with one command, shown in Cue under Agent → Connect.
No. Editing needs nothing, and transcription, voices and writing can run on your Mac with Whisper, macOS voices and Ollama or LM Studio. An OpenAI key adds cloud voices, captions and image generation.
macOS 12 or later (Apple Silicon and Intel), Windows 10 and 11 (64-bit) and Linux (64-bit, as an AppImage or a .deb). Everything works everywhere except a few features that use macOS frameworks: cutting out subjects, searching shots by what they show, and pointer effects on screen recordings.
It shouldn't any more: from 0.2.2 Cue is signed with a Developer ID and notarised by Apple, and it updates itself. Versions before 0.2.2 weren't, so they needed a right-click on Cue and Open the first time, and can't update: download 0.2.2 once by hand.
Star the repository, open issues with bugs and ideas, or send a pull request on GitHub.