Your tools, under the cursor.
Right-press and hold anywhere in After Effects. A wheel of hexagons appears where your pointer already is — flick toward what you want, let go. No panel to dock. Nothing on screen until you ask for it.
$0+ · MIT licensed · no account, no licence key, no activation limit
Bind a slot to anything
Six slots. Whatever After Effects can do.
Not a curated list of somebody else's favourite tools. If After Effects can do it — or if you can write it — it goes on the wheel.
Any menu command
Anything on After Effects' own menus, called by name. If it's in a menu, it can be one flick away.
Your own ExtendScript
A one-line snippet or a whole .jsx file, loaded once and cached. The script you wrote this morning is a first-class slot.
Effects, by search
Open the search hexagon, type a few letters, press Enter. It filters your entire installed catalogue and applies to the selection.
Presets
From Adobe's catalogue and your own. Applied as one step, so a single undo takes it straight back.
The anchor grid
A 3×3 grid built in, so the anchor point goes exactly where you point — plus the current frame straight to the clipboard.
Categories, one deep
Group six more under any slot. One level, deliberately — marking-menu accuracy falls off a cliff past two, so it stops there.
The part you notice on day three
It knows when a slot can't work.
A slot that needs a layer selection or a comp you don't have is drawn dead, and refuses to fire. The wheel is told what's selected on every summon — so you never trigger a no-op at speed and spend the next minute wondering what you just did.
Firing into nothing and reporting success is the failure mode this exists to prevent.
Gestural, not modal
A short right-click still opens the normal context menu. Hold, and the wheel takes over. You don't lose anything you already had.
Positional muscle memory
An empty slot stays empty and keeps its direction reserved. Adding a tool later never shuffles the ones your hand already knows.
Configured on a wheel
The settings window is the wheel — a big clickable copy of the real thing, with test-fire on every binding.
Two minutes
Install
- Quit After Effects. It only reads plug-ins at launch, and it locks the files while it's open.
- Run the installer. It finds every version of After Effects on your machine, installs into each one, and registers an uninstaller.
-
Turn it on:
Window → pieFX (Show/Hide). It stays armed across launches, so this is a once-ever step.
- Quit After Effects completely. It only reads plug-ins at launch.
-
Copy
pieFX.plugininto your After Effects folder — swap2026for your version, and copy it into each version if you run several. In the Finder, press ⇧⌘G and paste the path. macOS will ask for your password: that folder is owned by the system./Applications/Adobe After Effects 2026/Plug-ins/ -
Clear the download flag. macOS quarantines anything downloaded, and Gatekeeper
will refuse the bundle until that's cleared. Open Terminal and run this once per
After Effects version, with the same year:
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.
pieFX.plugin. It's a plug-in bundle, not an app —
the Finder has nothing to open it with, and that's the
“Apple could not verify…” dialog most people meet first. Copy it into the
folder and clear the flag instead. Universal binary; Apple Silicon is what it has
been tested on so far.
No catch
Free, and free for good.
MIT licensed with the source on GitHub. Install it on every machine you use — there's no account, no licence key and no activation limit to run out of.
Windows installer and macOS plug-in, both in the download.
★★★★★ Be the first to review it
Before you ask
Questions
Why is it unsigned? Is that safe?
A code-signing certificate costs $200–600 a year and pieFX is free, so there is nothing to pay for one. That is a decision, not an oversight. The whole source is on GitHub under MIT — you can read every line of what you are installing, or build it yourself, which is rather more than a signature would tell you.
Which versions of After Effects does it work with?
It is built against a current After Effects SDK and installs into each version it finds on
your machine. On Windows the installer handles that for you; on macOS you copy the plug-in
into each version's Plug-ins folder yourself.
Does it break the normal right-click menu?
No. A short right-click opens After Effects' own context menu exactly as it always did. The wheel only appears if you keep the button held for about 200ms — a threshold you can change. The two gestures do not collide.
Can I put my own scripts on it?
That is the point of it. A slot can hold an ExtendScript one-liner or a whole .jsx
file, alongside menu commands, effects and presets. Everything is rebound in
Window → pieFX Settings, which is itself a clickable wheel with test-fire on
each binding.
macOS says “Apple could not verify pieFX.plugin”. Now what?
That's Gatekeeper judging the download, not After Effects judging the plug-in. macOS
flags anything that arrives from the internet. Copy the plug-in into the
Plug-ins folder, then clear the flag once per After Effects version:
sudo xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "/Applications/Adobe After Effects 2026/Plug-ins/pieFX.plugin"
Also worth knowing: don't double-click pieFX.plugin. It's a bundle, not an
app, so the Finder has nothing to open it with — that's the dialog most people
hit first.
Is the macOS build as finished as the Windows one?
The plug-in itself is — the wheel fires real actions on both. What macOS does not have yet is an installer, so it is a copy-into-the-folder job for now. The binary is universal, but it has only been run on Apple Silicon so far; if you are on an Intel Mac and something looks wrong, a GitHub issue is genuinely useful.
What does it leave behind if I remove it?
On Windows, the registered uninstaller takes all of it. On macOS, delete the plug-in from the
Plug-ins folder. Either way three small settings files stay in your user folder
and can be deleted by hand.
Stop hunting through menus.
The wheel is under your cursor already. You just have to hold the button.