gdcli

gdcli drives a running Godot editor through its own APIs: nothing sits in the model's prompt, nothing is written behind the engine's back.

gdcli scene tree --depth 2
gdcli node add Sprite2D --parent Main --name Hero
gdcli prop set Hero position 'Vector2(64, 96)'
gdcli scene save

gdcli talks to a small editor plugin over loopback, and the plugin performs every operation through EditorInterface and EditorUndoRedoManager. Nothing is written by hand, so scene inheritance, instanced sub-scenes and resource references survive, and every change lands in your undo history as one gdcli: <cmd> step.

Why not something else

• An MCP server

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  Tool schemas (dozens of them) sit in the conversation forever. The transport is not the problem; the surface is. A CLI keeps the surface in the shell.

• Editing .tscn by hand

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  Inheritance and instanced scenes are not representable as text patches without a lossless parser, and one bad patch makes the engine refuse the file.

• Screen automation

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  Godot's accessibility tree exposes editor chrome only: buttons, tabs and dock shells. The scene tree, inspector rows and menus are invisible to it.

• Injecting into the editor process

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  The release binary is fully stripped, so this needs a per-version C++ shim — and it only reaches the same EditorInterface API a plugin already has.

Read the full design Wire protocol

What it can do

• Scene editing

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  Nodes, properties, signals, groups, instanced sub-scenes, undo/redo.

• Project data

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  Settings, autoloads, the input map, plugin toggles, filesystem scans, script checks.

• Editor UI

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  Selection, inspector, main screen, toasts, real PNG screenshots, play/stop.

• The running game

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  Inspect and change live nodes, evaluate expressions, capture print output.

Install

cargo install gdcli-cli
gdcli plugin install --project /path/to/game
# restart the Godot editor once
gdcli editor status

Prebuilt binaries and one-line installers are on the install page.

Where to go next

If you want to…	Read
set up a project	Install
edit a scene from the shell	Usage
let an agent drive Godot	For agents
know why it is built this way	Design
implement a client	Wire protocol