Snappy
A tiny, Ubuntu-style screenshot tool for macOS. Press one shortcut, pick an area, a window or the whole screen, and click once to capture.
Website: beqaabu.github.io/Snappy, with a demo you can try in the browser.
- Lives in the menu bar, no Dock icon
- Freezes the screen while you choose, so menus and tooltips stay put
- Drag to select, then move or resize the selection before capturing
- Quick markup on a selection: arrows, boxes, pen, highlighter, text, numbered steps and blur (for hiding passwords and personal info), all movable and editable
- Copy the text in a selection instead of an image, recognized on your Mac
- One-click full-screen and single-window captures
- Remembers your last selection, so repeat shots of the same area take one click
- Saves a PNG to
~/Pictures/Screenshots and copies it to the clipboard (both configurable), named after the app you captured, e.g. Screenshot 2026-10-13 at 09.05.07 (Safari).png
- Shows a preview in the corner: click to open it, drag it into any app
- A few small Swift files, no dependencies
Usage
Press ⌘⇧2 (the default; change it in Settings), or click the menu bar icon → Take Screenshot. A toolbar appears at the bottom of the screen:
| Button | Key | Action |
|---|
| Selection | S | Drag a box. Drag inside it to move, drag the handles to resize. |
| Screen | C | Capture the whole screen immediately. |
| Window | W | Hover a window to highlight it, click to capture it. |
| 3s Timer | D | Counts down 3 seconds (open a menu or hover something meanwhile), then captures your selection, or the whole screen if there's none |
| ✕ | Esc | Cancel (right-click also cancels). |
In Selection mode, click the blue camera button, press Return/Space, or double-click the selection to capture.
Markup
A bar next to the selection has markup tools. Pick one, then draw inside the selection:
| Tool | Key | |
|---|
| Arrow | A | Drag from the tail to the tip |
| Box | R | Drag a rectangle outline |
| Pen | P | Draw freehand |
| Highlighter | H | Drag over text to highlight it; the text stays readable |
| Text | T | Click where the text goes, type, press Return |
| Steps | N | Click to drop numbered badges: 1, 2, 3… |
| Blur | B | Drag over anything you want to hide; it's pixelated in the saved image |
Hover any button to see what it does; while a tool is active, a caption under the bar says how to use it. Pick a colour from the swatches, and the dot button cycles the size (small, medium, large) for lines, text and badges. Click the active tool again to go back to moving the selection.
Editing marks: click any mark to select it, then drag to move it, press Delete to remove it, or click a colour or the size dot to change it. Double-click text to edit it. Esc deselects. Undo (↩ or ⌘Z) steps back through everything, including moves and deletions.
Copy text
Click the text button next to the camera (or press ⌘C) to copy the text inside the selection instead of taking a picture: error messages, text in images, videos or apps that won't let you select it. If the selection contains a QR code, its link is copied instead. Recognition runs on your Mac with Apple's Vision framework; nothing is uploaded. Anything you've blurred is left out.
The capture covers the display the mouse pointer is on.
After each capture a thumbnail appears in the bottom-right corner for 5 seconds (it stays while you hover it). Click it to open the screenshot, drag it into another app to share it, or click its ✕ to dismiss.
Install
Requires macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later, on Apple silicon or Intel.
Homebrew
brew trust --tap beqaabu/tap # Homebrew 6+ asks you to trust third-party taps once
brew install --cask beqaabu/tap/snappy-app
The cask is snappy-app because snappy is already Homebrew's name for Google's compression library.
Download
Grab Snappy.zip from the latest release, unzip it and move Snappy.app to Applications.
Snappy isn't signed with an Apple Developer ID, so the first time you open it macOS blocks it. Go to System Settings → Privacy & Security and click Open Anyway.
Build from source
Needs the Xcode Command Line Tools (xcode-select --install).
git clone https://github.com/beqaabu/Snappy.git
cd Snappy
./build.sh --install
This builds a universal Snappy.app, copies it to /Applications and launches it. Use ./build.sh alone to only build into build/.
The first build creates a self-signed code signing certificate in signing/ (git-ignored). Keeping that certificate means macOS remembers Snappy's Screen Recording permission across rebuilds.
Screen Recording permission
On first launch macOS asks for Screen Recording permission. Enable Snappy in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Screen & System Audio Recording, then quit and reopen Snappy.
Settings
Click the menu bar icon → Settings… to change:
- Screenshot shortcut: click it and press a new combination. It needs ⌘, ⌃ or ⌥, or can be a function key on its own.
- After capturing: save to a file, copy to the clipboard (at least one stays on), show the preview, play the shutter sound
- Files: the save folder (default
~/Pictures/Screenshots) and PNG or JPEG
- Launch at login
- Updates: Check Now, or turn on a daily check (off by default). Homebrew installs are told to
brew upgrade --cask snappy-app instead of downloading.
Snappy only connects to the internet to check for updates, and only when you ask it to (Check Now, or the daily check you turned on).
Customizing the code
The code is in Sources/. Beyond what Settings covers:
The README image is rendered from the real overlay over a mock desktop: ./tools/render-preview.sh. The website lives in site/; its link preview comes from ./tools/make-og.sh. The app icon is drawn in code: ./tools/make-icon.sh.
Tests
./tools/test.sh runs the unit tests (shortcut parsing, version comparison, file naming, text row grouping). CI runs them on every push and pull request.
Releasing
Run the Release workflow from the Actions tab with a version like 1.1.0. It bumps Info.plist, tags, builds, signs, publishes a GitHub release with the changelog, and updates the Homebrew cask.
It needs two repository secrets:
SIGNING_P12_BASE64: base64 -i signing/id.p12, so every release is signed with the same certificateHOMEBREW_TAP_TOKEN (optional): a token that can push to beqaabu/homebrew-tap. Without it, the workflow prints the new version and sha256 to put in the cask by hand.
License
MIT
