Edith

Even Dead, I'm The Hero

A native desktop control center for macOS. Edith replaces a shelf of single-purpose utilities and idles at about 22 MB.

Free and open source under the GPL-3.0. Every feature is in the one app. No licence key, no account, no paid tier.

Download for macOS or install it with Homebrew:

brew install --cask pulkitxm/tap/edith

That taps, installs the app and puts ed and edith on your PATH. Edith updates itself through Sparkle, so brew upgrade --cask --greedy edith is the way to force Homebrew to fetch a newer release. Full command list: docs/homebrew.md, and how it all works.

edith.pulkit.page · Wiki · Support · Security

Edith requires macOS 14 or later on Apple Silicon.

Features

Agent usage

• Local accounting - Claude, Codex and pi activity is attributed to the right machine, repository, worktree and chat without sending the history anywhere.
• Rate-limit rings - Claude, Codex and Cursor limits as live gauges with second-by-second countdowns and history. Claude and Codex show the session and weekly windows, and Cursor shows Cursor Models and Other Models for the billing cycle. Claude's session, weekly, and Fable limits use the saved Claude Code login, then a profile-scoped shell OAuth token, with the status line as a fallback.
• Menu bar readout - choose which Claude, Codex and Cursor windows appear, with compact or roomy layouts and a time-aware risk tint.
• Alerts - threshold, ahead-of-pace, burning-hot, back-to-green and pre-reset notifications, all optional.
• Dashboard - KPIs with per-day, model, source, project and hourly charts, plus a sortable model table.
• Activity heatmap - GitHub-style daily spend calendar across your full history.
• Share cards - export polished activity, token, and milestone images from the dashboard or CLI, branded with the Edith repository link.
• Project drilldown - spend by project, worktree and chat, across every collected agent.
• Fleet usage - the same collector runs on your SSH machines and folds their agents in as their own sources, so the totals cover every box you code on.

Companion

• Private memory - deploy the multi-container backend on this Mac or an SSH machine, then reach it through a localhost tunnel.
• Capture and library - give it notes, recordings, images, video and PDFs; failed recordings wait in a local outbox instead of disappearing.
• Evidence-backed chat - ask questions over your own history, inspect citations, or ask three independent lenses for a second opinion.
• Your data, your exit - export or import the memory, erase individual episodes, wipe everything, move the deployment, and inspect its health and logs from Edith.

See the Companion guide for hosting requirements, data flow, model choices and recovery.

Machines

• One fleet view - add the local Mac and SSH hosts, monitor live CPU, memory, disks, temperatures, GPUs and running processes, and detach any machine into its own window.
• Terminal, files and workspaces - keep terminal tabs, browse and transfer files, preview remote content, and arrange saved split-pane workspaces.
• Containers - inspect Docker Compose groups, resources, configuration and logs, then start, stop, restart or remove containers.
• Power and cooling - wake, restart or shut down hosts; read fan speeds and temporarily switch supported platform profiles with automatic rollback.

See the remote machines guide for connection, privilege and platform details.

Everything else on the shelf

• Music player - your local music folder with thumbnails, drag-to-seek, fades, auto-advance and media keys; also controls Spotify and Apple Music.
• Clipboard history - a copy stack on a hotkey: search, category chips, Pinned/Today/Yesterday sections, color swatches, ⌘1-9 quick picks, pause capture, and paste straight into the app you were in.
• Color picker - system-wide eyedropper on a hotkey, with swatch history.
• Emoji picker - every emoji this Mac can draw on a hotkey, with search, categories, skin tones and your most-used pinned to the top.
• Keystroke Highlight - toggle clear keycaps for demos with a global shortcut, then let each key press fade automatically.
• Notch shelf - the notch becomes a hover-to-open shelf for drag-and-drop file staging, now-playing controls and a camera check.
• Calendar - your agenda grouped by day, with one-tap join links.
• Audio mixer - per-app volume control.
• Mic mute - system-wide microphone kill switch with a menu bar indicator.
• Focus dim - dims every screen except the window you are working in.
• System tools - independent Keep Awake toggle, CPU and memory readout, and a keyboard-cleaning lock that auto-restores after 60s.
• Lid awake - keeps the Mac running with the lid shut and unplugged, with timed or lid-cycle sessions, battery floors and automatic sleep restoration.
• Disk cleaner - scans build caches, package managers and old logs.
• Global shortcut - toggle the panel from anywhere, ⌥⌘E by default and re-recordable.

Command line

The bundled ed launcher connects to the running Edith app. It manages downloaded extensions and sends JSON operations to an enabled extension.

ed extensions ls
ed extensions install keepAwake
ed extensions enable keepAwake
ed extensions info keepAwake
ed extensions disable keepAwake
ed extensions remove keepAwake
ed invoke <id> <operation> --json '{"value":"synthetic"}'

Command results are JSON. Errors are JSON on stderr with nonzero exit codes. Help and version work without a running app. Commands do not open Edith or load extensions implicitly. Each downloaded extension defines its own operations.

Full reference: docs/cli, also published to the wiki.

Lid Awake needs one-time approval for Edith's background helper. Read the Lid Awake guide before using it in a closed bag or on battery.

Privacy

Usage data never leaves your Mac. There is no account and no telemetry. Rate-limit checks go directly from your machine to your provider. Optional iCloud backup merges selected app data across your own Macs and nowhere else.

The optional Companion stores its memory on the machine you choose. Local embedding, vision and speech models run there. Reasoning can stay on that host or use a provider you configure, in which case the requested context goes directly from your host to that provider. Edith operates no data service in between.

Presenter mode blurs spend figures, track names and calendar entries for screen sharing, and detects screen shares automatically.

Performance

Built to sit in the menu bar all day. Measured on an Apple M4 Pro, CPU as a share of one core:

State	CPU	Memory
Idle, panel closed	~0%	~22 MB
Music playing, panel closed	~1%	~40 MB
Paused	<1%	~40 MB

Disabling a tab tears down its timers and background jobs entirely, per-frame UI only redraws while the panel is open, and the usage collector caches parses so a refresh only touches files that changed.

Contributors

Thank you to everyone who has shipped a change in Edith.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md for building from source, the test suite, and how releases are cut. Participation is governed by the Code of Conduct, and larger decisions follow the process in GOVERNANCE.md.

Licence

Edith is free software licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0. You may use, study, modify and redistribute it; any version you distribute must also be released under the GPL-3.0 with its source available.

Sparkle, used for in-app updates, is distributed under the MIT licence.

PDF page image export uses PDFium, with its distribution and dependency notices included in the Studio resource bundle.

Attribution

The lid-awake feature was inspired by Awayke, an MIT-licensed macOS utility by daemonphantom.

SSH clipboard synchronization uses ssh-clipboard, created by Justin Schroeder and maintained by Standard Agents under the MIT License.

Window Sweaters, which knits a border around every window, is documented in the Window Sweaters guide. It is a Swift port of Window Sweaters by Sara Gordic, which is itself derived from JankyBorders by Felix Kratz. Both are licensed under the GPL-3.0, as is Edith. The knit renderer, the colourwork charts and the curated app colourways are Sara Gordic's design and are reproduced here with their structure and values intact. Application names in the collection belong to their respective owners and describe colourway inspiration only; no affiliation or endorsement is implied.