switchblade

fzf for videos — a GPU-rendered video clip picker.

Pipe file paths in on stdin, fly around a grid of moving thumbnails, act on the clip you land on.

switchblade ~/Clips                        # or:
fd -e mp4 -e mov . ~/Clips | switchblade

Built for VJs picking clips mid-set, creators sorting AI-generated footage, and anyone with a folder full of clips and no fast way to see them. Not an editor, not a media manager — a picker.

Status: early and moving fast. macOS-first (Metal via wgpu). See DESIGN.md for the design record and TASKS.md for the roadmap.

What it does

• Instanced GPU grid — thousands of clips render as one draw call; near-black field, thick-bordered selection, buttery springs everywhere.
• Streaming stdin — tiles appear while fd is still finding files. Newline- or NUL-delimited, never blocks on a slow producer.
• Cached thumbnails — one frame per clip (ffmpeg) in a content-addressed sidecar cache; a relaunch over the same library is instant. Your media files are never written to.
• Storyboard sheets — a sprite sheet of frames sampled across each clip, generated on demand the first time a clip is previewed; powers the seekbar hover thumbnails and the chapter chips.
• Live playback in-tile — the selected and hovered clips play real (silent, looping) video inside their tiles, seek-matched to the thumbnail's frame so nothing jumps. An in-process (libav) decoder keeps the demuxer resident, so seeking is a jump-in-place, not a reload.
• Quickview — Space (or click the selection): the grid dims and frosts and the clip plays large and centered at natural resolution (up to 1080p, configurable). Move the pointer over the video for a seekbar — click to seek, hold-drag to scrub, hover for storyboard thumbnails; scroll to fly the filmstrip of neighbors along the bottom, or h/l to step. [/] skip through the clip anywhere.
• Chapter bar — g opens the clip fullscreen-in-app with a strip of chapter chips (real container chapters when present, synthesized checkpoints otherwise); click a chip to jump the video there.
• Shuffle, random, auto-skip — s shuffles the library, x jumps to a random clip, t auto-advances after a few seconds of playback with a timer ring on the video (lean-back skimming).
• Flexible grid layout — justified rows where every tile keeps its clip's true aspect ratio (the classic uniform grid is one config line away).
• Drag out — drag a tile or filmstrip chip straight into Finder or any other app, exactly like dragging a file out of Finder.
• Pinch zoom — tile size scales, columns reflow with a crossfade. -/=/0 on the keyboard.
• Keymap — bind any non-movement key to internal actions or launched programs with {path}/{dir}/{name} templates: open in mpv, reveal in Finder, run your renamer script, push to a VJ tool.
• Hot-tunable feel — every motion constant (springs, gaps, scales, fades) lives in switchblade.toml and reloads within 250ms while the app runs.
• iCloud-aware — placeholder (not-downloaded) files get a cloud badge and are never force-downloaded.
• Cheap when still — the render loop idles at ~2% of a core when nothing is animating, and playback/animation pause automatically while the window is unfocused (configurable).

Requirements

• macOS (first target platform)
• ffmpeg 8.x — both the ffmpeg/ffprobe CLIs (thumbnails, sprite sheets) and the dev libraries the in-process seekable decoder links against (brew install ffmpeg provides both)
• mpv — optional, the default open command (brew install mpv)

Build & run

cargo build --release
fd -e mp4 -e mov . ~/Clips | ./target/release/switchblade

cargo run -- --demo   # demo mode: fake tiles, no media needed
switchblade --help    # options, including --animation and --fullscreen

Keys (defaults)

Key	Action
hjkl / arrows	move selection (row-end wraps to the next row)
Enter / o	open in mpv
Space	quickview (internal preview; Esc/Space/click closes, h/l browse)
g	chapter bar (fullscreen view + chapter/checkpoint chips; click jumps there)
x	jump to a random clip
s	shuffle the library
t	toggle auto-skip (auto-advance while previewing, with a timer ring)
c	copy path
r	reveal in Finder
[ / ]	skip back / forward through the playing clip (wraps)
D	browse the selected clip's siblings (its parent dir)
p	toggle pause-when-unfocused
- / = / 0	zoom out / in / reset (also trackpad pinch)
f	fullscreen
q	quit

Trackpad pans without changing the selection. Click selects; clicking the selected clip quickviews. In quickview, the pointer works the seekbar and the scroll wheel scrubs the filmstrip. Everything except movement is remappable.

Configuration

switchblade --init writes the annotated default config to ~/.config/switchblade.toml; a switchblade.toml in the working directory (or ~/.config/switchblade/config.toml) is also picked up, first match wins. Motion and style values hot-reload while the app runs; media quality (thumb_width/height/quality, anim_grid, atlas size) applies on restart. Keys and commands:

[keys]
r = "rename_script"

[commands.rename_script]
type = "launch"
program = "~/bin/rename-media"
args = ["{path}"]

See the example config — it documents every field.

Cache

Thumbnails, sprite sheets, and probed metadata live under ~/Library/Caches/switchblade.noindex/v1/objects/ keyed by file fingerprint (size + mtime by default, so renamed or moved files keep their cache; cache_key = "path" adds the absolute path to the key). .noindex keeps Spotlight away. It's plain files — inspect it, or delete it any time (--cleanup-cache prunes dead entries) and it regenerates.

License

MIT