pieFX

Stop hunting through menus.pieFX puts a six-slot wheel under your cursor. Right-press and hold, flick toward what you want, let go. No panel to dock, nothing on screen until you ask for it, no shortcut to memorise beyond the one gesture.Bind a slot to anything After Effects can do: Any AE menu command, by name Your own ExtendScript — a one-liner or a whole .jsx Any effect from your installed library, found by search Any preset, yours or Adobe's — one undo takes it back Built-ins: the 3×3 anchor grid, and the current frame to the clipboard Plus one level of drill-down for categories, and an effect search that filters your whole catalogue and applies on Enter.It knows when a slot can't work. Slots that need a selection or a comp you don't have are drawn dead and refuse to fire, so you never trigger a no-op at speed and wonder what happened.Free, and free for good. MIT licensed, source on GitHub. No account, no licence key, no activation limit — install it on every machine you use.Install — WindowsRun the installer with After Effects closed. It finds every AE version you have, installs into each, and registers an uninstaller. Then Window → pieFX (Show/Hide).The installer is unsigned — pieFX is free and doesn't earn a code-signing certificate — so Windows shows SmartScreen once. Click More info, then Run anyway.Install — macOS Quit After Effects completely — it only reads plug-ins at launch. Copy pieFX.plugin into /Applications/Adobe After Effects 2026/Plug-ins/ — swap 2026 for your version, and copy it into each version if you run several. In the Finder, press ⇧⌘G and paste that path. macOS will ask for your password; that folder is owned by the system. Clear the download flag — macOS quarantines anything from the internet, and Gatekeeper refuses the bundle until this is cleared. In Terminal, once per After Effects version: sudo xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "/Applications/Adobe After Effects 2026/Plug-ins/pieFX.plugin". It asks for your password and prints nothing when it works. Start After Effects. Window → pieFX (Show/Hide) — it arms itself on launch, so there's usually nothing to click. If macOS says “Apple could not verify pieFX.plugin”, that is Gatekeeper judging the download, not After Effects judging the plug-in — the xattr line above is the whole fix. And do not double-click pieFX.plugin: it is a plug-in bundle, not an application, so the Finder has nothing to open it with, and that is the dialog most people meet first.There's no .pkg yet, so macOS is a copy-into-the-folder job for now. It's a universal binary; Apple Silicon is what it has been tested on so far.Uninstall: on Windows, the registered uninstaller takes all of it. On macOS, delete pieFX.plugin from that folder. Either way three small files stay in ~/Library/Application Support/pieFX/ (or your user folder on Windows) and can be deleted.Requires After Effects.Source and full docs: github.com/AldaGs/pieFX