Boop

Boop is a free, native Mac utility that lets you pipe text through a growing library of transformations — format JSON, encode URLs, strip HTML, convert colour codes, and much more — all without leaving your current context.

What is Boop?

Boop is a macOS text-processing scratch-pad that lives in your menu bar and drops into view the moment you hit a global shortcut. You paste text in, pick a script from the left-hand list, and the result replaces your input instantly. There is no web form to open, no terminal command to remember, and no clipboard history to untangle — just a floating window that does exactly one thing and then gets out of your way.

What sets it apart from browser-based tools like CyberChef or the dozens of single-purpose sites developers have bookmarked over the years is that it runs entirely on-device. Nothing you paste into Boop ever touches a server, which matters when you're working with API keys, database dumps, or anything vaguely sensitive.

What does Boop do best?

Boop's strongest suit is extensibility: every transformation is a small JavaScript file you can read, modify, or replace.

• JSON formatting and minification — the use-case that accounts for a disproportionate share of daily sessions. Paste a mangled API response, hit JSON Prettify, done.
• Encoding and decoding — Base64, URL encoding, HTML entities, JWT inspection. Each operation is its own script, so there's no ambiguity about what mode you're in.
• Text manipulation — sort lines, remove duplicates, count words, convert case, strip whitespace. The kind of things you'd normally reach for a regex in a code editor to accomplish.
• Hash generation — MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256 without opening Terminal.
• Custom scripts — if the built-in library doesn't cover your niche need, you author a script in JavaScript and Boop picks it up immediately. I've written a handful myself: one that extracts all unique domain names from a blob of log output, another that converts a CSV column to a SQL IN (...) clause.

The script picker has fuzzy search, so even with sixty-plus transformations in the list, the right one appears after two or three keystrokes.

Is Boop free?

Yes — Boop is completely free to download and use. You can grab it from the Mac App Store or install it via Homebrew Cask. The developer accepts tips but there is no paid tier, no feature gate, and no subscription. It is also open-source, so the full codebase is auditable on GitHub.

Who should use Boop?

Boop is aimed squarely at developers, but it rewards any Mac user who manipulates text with any regularity. Backend engineers will hit it multiple times a day for JSON wrangling. Front-end developers reach for the colour-conversion and CSS-related scripts. DevOps folks appreciate the hash and encoding tools during pipeline debugging. Technical writers occasionally use it just to strip HTML from copy-pasted web content.

If you have never felt the need to format a JSON blob, decode a Base64 string, or sort a list of values, Boop is probably overkill — macOS's built-in TextEdit and a couple of Shortcuts automations will serve you fine. But if those tasks come up more than once a week, Boop will earn its permanent place in your menu bar faster than almost any other utility I've installed.

How does Boop compare to alternatives?

The honest comparison field is thin because Boop occupies an unusual niche. CyberChef (the GCHQ web tool) is far more powerful and supports chaining transformations, but it requires a browser and sends nothing to a server only because it runs locally as a static page — and it has a learning curve that Boop simply does not. Retcon and Coherence X cover some overlapping ground as text-manipulation tools but lean more toward clipboard management. TextSoap focuses on document-level cleaning rather than developer encodings. For raw Terminal power, jq, openssl, and Python one-liners beat Boop handily — but you have to remember the syntax. Boop's value is discoverability and zero friction: a consistent UI surface for the fifty transformations you need often enough to matter, but not often enough to keep the commands memorised.

What are the best Boop alternatives?

If Boop doesn't fit your workflow, the closest alternatives are CyberChef (browser-based, chainable transforms), Tot (text scratch-pad without transformations), and rolling your own Raycast extensions for individual operations. None of them match Boop's combination of native performance, privacy, and extensibility in a single lightweight package.