BetterShot

One app for the whole screen. Screenshots, screen recording, and a video editor, native on macOS. An open-source alternative to CleanShot X and Loom: no subscription, no account, no telemetry. Nothing leaves your Mac unless you share it, and shares go to storage you own.

What it does

• Capture a region, the full screen, or a single window, plus OCR and an on-screen color picker
• Record any display, window, or region to MP4 with system audio, microphone, and a face cam bubble
• Edit recordings on a multi-clip timeline: cuts, per-clip speed, transitions, crop, cursor-tracked auto-zoom, a restylable cursor, on-device captions, a keyboard overlay, masks, color grading, and a 3D camera
• Annotate screenshots with arrows, shapes, text, numbered badges, blur, and spotlight
• Beautify with backgrounds, padding, corner radius, and shadow, applied automatically if you want
• Share a link from your own Cloudflare R2 bucket; every upload is compressed first and video always ships as MP4

Install

brew install --cask bettershot

Or download the latest .dmg from Releases.

On first launch, grant two permissions in System Settings > Privacy & Security: Screen Recording to capture, and Accessibility to take over the default screenshot shortcuts.

Shortcuts

Action	Shortcut
Region screenshot	⌘⇧4
Fullscreen screenshot	⌘⇧3
Record screen	⌘⇧2
OCR text scan	⌘⇧O
Color picker (hex)	⌘⇧C

⌘⇧2 opens the all-in-one bar: region, window, screen, OCR, color picker and recording all live on it. Your last region appears as a dashed ghost as soon as the bar opens; press A to capture it again. During region capture the ghost stays: Return, A, or a click inside it captures it, Space switches to window selection. All of these are re-bindable in Settings > Shortcuts. In the editor, every tool carries its own single-key shortcut on its button, and ⌘S saves, ⇧⌘C copies, ⌘Z undoes.

Build from source

brew install xcodegen
git clone https://github.com/KartikLabhshetwar/better-shot.git
cd better-shot
make release
open .build/Build/Products/Release/BetterShot.app

Needs macOS 26, Xcode 26 (Swift 6), and XcodeGen. Native Swift and SwiftUI throughout: no Electron, no web views, and a single Swift package (DockProgress).

Contributing

Contributions are welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md for the project layout, how the capture and editor flows fit together, and the make targets.

License

BSD 3-Clause. See LICENSE.