Control any app with Claude — CLI Anything setup (free, ~5 minutes)

app-control-setup.md

Control any app with Claude — the free setup

Free. Open source. About 5 minutes.

Claude can't click buttons in your apps. But it can talk to them through a command line — and there's a free tool that writes that command line for you.

It's called CLI Anything (Apache-2.0, 48,000+ stars on GitHub). Point it at an app, and Claude reads the app's code, writes the commands, and installs them.

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What you need first

• Claude Code (the terminal version of Claude)
• Python 3.10 or newer — check with python3 --version
• The app you want to control, installed on your computer

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Setup — two commands

Open Claude Code in any folder and run:

/plugin marketplace add HKUDS/CLI-Anything

/plugin install cli-anything

That's it. Claude can now build a command line for any app you point it at:

/cli-anything ./blender

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Faster start: 100+ CLIs are already built

You don't have to generate anything. There's a hub with ready-made command lines — Blender, GIMP, LibreOffice, OBS, draw.io, Audacity and many more:

pip install cli-anything-hub
cli-hub list
cli-hub install blender

Then tell Claude what you want. This is the exact thing I did in the reel:

Use cli-anything-blender to build a scene: add the monkey and a floor, give the monkey a terracotta material, add a key light and a fill light, place a camera at 55mm, then render it to suzanne.png.

Twelve commands. Ten seconds. Blender never opened.

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Three more things to try

1 · Batch-edit images without opening GIMP

Install the gimp CLI from cli-hub, then resize every image in this folder to 1080px wide and export them as web-ready JPEGs.

2 · Build a diagram from a description

Install the drawio CLI, then draw my onboarding flow as a flowchart: signup → email verify → welcome call → first project.

3 · Turn a document into a clean PDF

Install the libreoffice CLI, then convert every .docx in this folder to PDF and tell me which ones failed.

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Honest limits (read this — it saves you an hour)

• The app has to be installed. The CLI drives your local software; it does not replace it.
• Your terminal has to find the app. On a Mac, Blender lives inside the app bundle — I had to add it to my PATH before the render worked: export PATH="/Applications/Blender.app/Contents/MacOS:$PATH" If a command says "not found", this is almost always why.
• Generated CLIs are not magic. For a brand-new app, Claude reads the code and writes commands — that takes minutes, not seconds, and the result is worth a quick test before you trust it.
• Some commands are index-based, not name-based (e.g. material assign 0 0). Ask Claude to run --help on a subcommand when something looks off.

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From @buildwith.conrad — comment CONTROL on any post and I'll send you this file.