Power tools
The everyday utilities that make hands-free work fast: turn the commands you run a hundred times a day into one-click buttons, and hand Claude exactly what you're looking at with a single shortcut.
Verbative Shot
The fastest way to give Claude visual context. Press ⌃⌘S (works system-wide from any app, and you can rebind it right from the panel) or click the Verbative Shotbutton, then drag a region anywhere on screen — it goes straight to your clipboard, ready to paste into Claude. From the button you can keep dragging to grab several regions in a row (press Esc to finish); they're stacked into a single image on your clipboard, so one pastedrops the whole picture — the error, the code, and the design at once — into Claude. (The clipboard holds one image, so the stack is how “several at once” works.) It all runs on your Mac via the macOS screen-capture API — no image is ever uploaded. Free includes 10 captures per day; Advanced is unlimited.
Drag region after region — they stack into one image on your clipboard for a single paste.
See Verbative Shot in action →
Mechanics — reusable shell scripts
Mechanics are the shell commands you run all the time — npm run dev, a build, a database reset, launching a browser — saved once and run from the Verbative panel. Each one is just shell text, run in its own terminal, so anything you'd type at a prompt works. Free includes up to 2 Mechanics; Advanced is unlimited. Groups are unlimited on both.
Each Mechanic runs in its own terminal — your real shell and PATH, live output, one-click stop.
The Mechanics panel — groups of saved scripts, each run or stopped in its own terminal.
Opening the panel
In the Verbative side panel, click Verbative Mechanics (the button just below Advisory Board). It expands in place into the Mechanics panel. You can also run the Verbative: Open Mechanics command from the VS Code Command Palette.
Groups
Mechanics live in groupsyou control. There's always a default group to start with; add more with + New group, rename one with the pencil, and delete one with the ✕ (the last group always stays). Collapse a group to tuck its Mechanics away. Groups are just organization — a Dev group, a Chores group, whatever matches how you work.
Creating & editing a Mechanic
Click + Add Mechanic in a group to open the editor. Give it a name and type the script in the built-in shell editor (Tab indents). To reuse a script you already have, click Import .sh… and pick any .sh/.bash/.zsh/.commandfile — its contents load straight into the editor and the file's name is remembered. A Mechanic is saved as plain text in .verbative/mechanics.jsonin your project, so it's editable anytime and stays on your machine (Verbative gitignores it by default).
Running & stopping
Hit ▷ to run a Mechanic. It opens its own VS Code terminal and runs the script there — which means it inherits your real login shell and PATH (the thing a bare command often trips on, e.g. nvm-managed node), and you see its live output. The button flips to ■ Stop while it runs; stopping sends an interrupt and closes the terminal. Long-running Mechanics like a dev server keep running until you stop them or close their terminal yourself.
Examples
- Dev server —
npm run dev - Open a preview window —
open -a "Google Chrome" http://localhost:3000 - Reset the database —
./scripts/reset-db.sh(imported from your repo) - Tail logs —
tail -f /tmp/app.log
Ask Claude to make one
You don't have to build Mechanics by hand. Just tell the Claude agent in your terminal — “create a Verbative mechanic that runs the dev server” — and it knows what to do: Verbative installs a Claude Code skill that teaches the agent the Mechanics format, and the agent saves it straight into your project. It shows up in the panel live, ready to run. (Creating and editing are done by the agent; running stays a panel action.)