Easy Kap
A native macOS screen recorder in Swift, inspired by Kap. Built for Apple Silicon and Intel, with no Electron and no bundled ffmpeg.
Inspired by Kap
Easy Kap started from a love of Kap by Wulkano, which hasn't had a release since 2022. It keeps Kap's workflow and look — the menu bar recorder, the area picker, the hover-to-trim editor, the gradient ring — and rebuilds them on current system frameworks. It is an independent project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Wulkano. Kap's menu bar icon is reused under its MIT license; see LICENSE.
Features
- Capture: ScreenCaptureKit (
SCRecordingOutput) records straight to H.264, with the cursor and click highlighting drawn by the system, optional system audio and microphone, pause and resume, and Easy Kap's own windows left out of the recording.
- Area picker: drag to select an area, lock an aspect ratio, pick a whole screen or an app's window, or enter an exact size. The last recorded area is remembered.
- Editor: the video loops; hovering shows trim controls with frame previews. Export to GIF, MP4 (H.264), MP4 (HEVC) or APNG through AVFoundation/VideoToolbox and ImageIO, with resizing and frame rate options. Save to disk, copy to the clipboard, or open with another app.
- System integration: a global shortcut, Liquid Glass on macOS 26+, and light and dark appearance.
Requires macOS 15+.
Install
- Download EasyKap.dmg from the latest release.
- Open it and drag Easy Kap into Applications.
- Open Easy Kap. It's signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple, so it opens like any other app.
- Record once and allow Screen Recording when macOS asks, then reopen Easy Kap.
Or install it with Homebrew:
brew install --cask chen86860/tap/easy-kap
Easy Kap updates itself, so there's no need to brew upgrade it.
Privacy
Easy Kap sends anonymous usage data to help decide what to improve: app launches, when a recording starts, finishes or fails, and which formats and settings exports use, along with the app version, macOS version and language. Events are tied to a random ID made on your Mac, not to you. They never include your recordings, file names, paths or error messages. The code that sends them is in Kap/App/Telemetry.swift.
It's on by default. Turn it off in Settings → General → Privacy → Share anonymous usage data.
Develop
brew install xcodegen create-dmg # the .xcodeproj is generated from project.yml; create-dmg packs the DMG
make build # Debug build
make run # build and launch
make test # Swift Testing suite
make lint # SwiftLint (version pinned in mise.toml)
make release # Universal Release build
make dmg # Universal Release build packaged as build/EasyKap.dmg
make install # build, replace /Applications/Easy Kap.app, and launch it
make uninstall # remove the installed app
Tools/install.sh also takes --reset-permissions (forget the Screen Recording and Microphone grants after installing) and uninstall --purge (also remove settings and cached recordings). It only touches Easy Kap, moves removed apps to the Trash, and never deletes exported recordings.
Builds are ad-hoc signed. macOS ties the Screen Recording permission to the signature, so you may need to allow the app again after rebuilding.
The disk image window background is drawn by Tools/make-dmg-background.swift into Tools/dmg/; rerun it after changing the layout in Tools/make-dmg.sh.
The app icon is drawn by Tools/render-icon.swift (swift Tools/render-icon.swift icon.png); build the iconset from that PNG with sips and iconutil.
Releases
Add the version's notes to CHANGELOG.md first. Pushing a tag such as v0.1.2 then runs the release workflow on GitHub Actions: it stamps the version into the app, builds EasyKap.dmg with Tools/make-dmg.sh, signs it for Sparkle, and publishes it with an appcast.xml as a release. Installed copies find the update through that appcast. With the APPLE_CERTIFICATE_P12_BASE64, APPLE_CERTIFICATE_PASSWORD, APPLE_SIGNING_IDENTITY, APPLE_ID, APPLE_APP_SPECIFIC_PASSWORD and APPLE_TEAM_ID secrets set, the workflow also signs the app with Developer ID and notarizes the disk image (Tools/sign-app.sh, Tools/notarize-dmg.sh). The asset names stay fixed, so releases/latest/download/EasyKap.dmg always points at the newest build.
Website
The product site, easy-kap.emmmm.dev, lives in website/: React, Vite, TanStack Router, Tailwind CSS and shadcn/ui, served by Cloudflare Workers.
cd website
pnpm install
pnpm dev # local server
pnpm typecheck && pnpm lint && pnpm test && pnpm build
pnpm run deploy # build and deploy with Wrangler
License
MIT
