Host acceptance passed · 2026-09-20 Not signed · Not distributed

HUD Commander

A radial command wheel for After Effects that reads the host's live macOS menu tree instead of shipping a hard-coded command list. Hold, drag to a segment, release. Whatever your installation actually exposes — including your own effects — is what the wheel shows.

Coming soon — HUD Commander No price, no download and no purchase link on this page, because none exists yet. This is a status page, not a listing.

Where this actually stands

Version 2.1.1. The honest status, gate by gate:

Live host acceptance: passed, 2026-09-20. The primary undocked entry is a complete 560 × 620 modeless window that stays visible after a command runs. The running entry rendered all eight root categories with the live bridge connected; After Effects exposed 9 menus and all 16 Williams Media effects. The installed helper switched a disposable project's tool from Selection to Hand and back again — the non-destructive command path, proven in a real host.
Installed parity: verified. The 12-file installed package matched dist/ exactly by hash. npm test and npm run test:live both pass.
Not signed. There is no distribution-signed package. A signed build and clean-machine installation evidence are the outstanding gates before this goes anywhere outside this machine.
Not for sale. There is no listing, no price and no checkout. When there is, the button above gets an href and this sentence changes.

Publisher: Williams Media · Extension IDs: com.williamsmedia.HUDCommander.floating and com.williamsmedia.HUDCommander.panel · Version 2.1.1

How it works

One idea, applied consistently: never guess what After Effects can do — ask it.

Live menu tree

Read from the host, not a table

Every native menu — File, Edit, Composition, Layer, Effect, Animation, View, Window, Help — plus every submenu your installation exposes, including Effect > Williams Media. Checked, shortcut, submenu and enabled/disabled state are read at runtime.

Radial wheel

Hold, drag, release

An SVG radial wheel that paginates at eight segments so labels stay readable. Back and Home walk the hierarchy; Refresh re-reads the host after the selection context changes.

Keyboard

Fully driveable without the mouse

1–8 run the visible segments, arrows page and move focus, Enter/Space activate, ? opens the shortcut reference, Escape closes.

Two entries

Modeless window, optional panel

The floating modeless window is the primary experience and opens with the full wheel already visible. The dockable panel is optional — click the centre puck to open the wheel there.

Verification tiers, kept separate

Four different claims, four different kinds of proof. Collapsing them into one "it works" is exactly what this page refuses to do.

✓

source

Syntax, CEP manifest XML, entrypoints and the pure wheel model, all checked by npm test without a host.

native menus discovered

The bridge queried the running After Effects menu bar and found all nine root menus plus all 16 Williams Media effects.

installed files, hash-matched

The installed WMHUDCommander package matched the built dist/ byte for byte — no drift between what was tested and what was running.

✓

live command executed

In a disposable project: tool switched Selection → Hand, then restored. A real command through the real bridge, with nothing left changed.

What this does not prove

All of the above happened on one developer machine with After Effects already installed and macOS Accessibility already granted. Nobody has installed this on a clean machine, and the package is not distribution-signed — this Mac has no code-signing identity at all. So there is no supported-version claim on this page beyond the single host that was tested, and no install instructions for anyone else.

It is also macOS-only by construction: the bridge drives After Effects through macOS Accessibility. There is no Windows build and none is claimed.

Product boundary

No ExtendScript, no hostscript, no evalScript, no command-id table. It clicks the menus you already have.

No cloud service, no remote media call, no telemetry. The bridge is a local osascript helper and nothing else.

No privileged system directories. The release build embeds the helper and writes it to a temporary file at runtime, so installing does not add anything system-level.

Accessibility denied fails loudly. If macOS refuses control of System Events, the wheel stays visible, reports the bridge error, and makes no claim that a command ran.

What the tested host was

This is the configuration the 2026-09-20 acceptance ran on — a record of one machine, not a compatibility matrix.

Item	Recorded
Host app	Adobe After Effects (CEP extension, installed as `WMHUDCommander`)
OS	macOS, with Accessibility control of System Events granted to the host process
Install path	The user CEP extensions directory — no system-level install
Signing	None. Not distribution-signed, so this is not an install anyone else should be given yet

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