macshot

A native macOS screenshot tool inspired by Flameshot. No Electron, no Qt, no bloat — just pure Swift and AppKit.

macshot lives in your menu bar and lets you capture, annotate, and share screenshots with a single hotkey.

Features

• Screen recording — record any region as MP4 (H.264) or GIF; interact with apps normally while recording, or toggle annotation mode to draw on the live screen; recordings saved to your configured folder
• Instant capture — global hotkey (default: Cmd+Shift+X) freezes your screen and lets you select a region
• Window snap — hover over any window to highlight it with a blue border and click to snap to it; Tab toggles snap mode, F captures full screen
• Live QR & barcode detection — automatically detects QR codes and barcodes in the selected area; shows an inline bar to open URLs or copy the payload
• Annotation tools — arrow, line, rectangle, filled rectangle, ellipse, pencil, marker/highlighter, text, numbered markers, pixelate, Gaussian blur
• Rich text — bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, adjustable font size; Enter inserts a new line; confirm with ✓ button
• Translation — translate extracted OCR text to any language directly in the OCR results window
• Shift-constrain — hold Shift while drawing for straight lines, perfect circles, and squares
• Auto-redact PII — one-click detection and redaction of emails, phone numbers, credit cards, SSNs, API keys, and more
• Delay capture — set a 3/5/10 second timer to capture tooltips, menus, and hover states
• Secure redaction — pixelate tool is irreversible (multi-pass downscale, not a reversible blur)
• Color picker — 12 preset colors, one click to switch
• Undo/Redo — Cmd+Z / Cmd+Shift+Z
• OCR text extraction — extract text from any selected area using Apple Vision, with copy, search, and translation
• Beautify mode — wrap screenshots in a macOS window frame with traffic lights, shadow, and gradient background (6 styles)
• Background removal — remove the background from any selection using Apple Vision (macOS 14+)
• Pin to screen — pin a screenshot as a floating always-on-top window, movable and resizable
• Floating thumbnail — thumbnail slides in after capture for quick drag-and-drop (toggleable)
• Screenshot history — re-copy recent captures from the menu bar "Recent Captures" submenu (configurable, in-memory)
• Upload to imgbb — one-click upload; view and copy upload/delete URLs in Preferences → Uploads
• Pixel dimensions — always-visible size label above the selection, click to type an exact resolution
• Quick save — right-click a window (snap mode) or drag to instantly save to your configured folder
• Output options — copy to clipboard (Cmd+C), save to file (Cmd+S)
• Multi-monitor support — captures all screens simultaneously
• Configurable hotkey — change it in Preferences
• Lightweight — ~8 MB memory at idle, menu bar only (no dock icon)

Install

Homebrew

brew install sw33tlie/macshot/macshot

Manual

Download the latest .dmg from Releases, open it, and drag macshot.app to /Applications.

Build from source

Requires Xcode 16+ and macOS 14+.

git clone https://github.com/sw33tLie/macshot.git
cd macshot
xcodebuild -project macshot.xcodeproj -scheme macshot -configuration Release -derivedDataPath build clean build
cp -R build/Build/Products/Release/macshot.app /Applications/

Usage

1. Launch macshot — it appears as an icon in your menu bar
2. Press Cmd+Shift+X (or click "Capture Screen" from the menu bar)
3. Drag to select a region, or hover over a window and click to snap to it
4. Annotate using the toolbar below the selection
5. Press Cmd+C to copy to clipboard, or Cmd+S to save to file
6. Press Esc to cancel at any time

Keyboard shortcuts

Shortcut	Action
Cmd+Shift+X	Capture screen (configurable)
Enter	Confirm and copy to clipboard
Cmd+C	Copy to clipboard
Cmd+S	Save to file
Cmd+Z	Undo
Cmd+Shift+Z	Redo
Esc	Cancel
Tab	Toggle window snap mode
F	Capture full screen (snap mode)
Right-click	Quick save/copy snapped window (snap mode)
Right-click + drag	Quick save to file (no annotation)
Shift (while drawing)	Constrain to straight lines / perfect shapes

Permissions

macshot requires Screen Recording permission. macOS will prompt you on first capture. If it doesn't work:

1. Open System Settings > Privacy & Security > Screen Recording
2. Enable macshot (or remove and re-add it)
3. Restart macshot

Requirements

• macOS 14.0 (Sonoma) or later

License

MIT