HotShot documentation

Capture the screen, a window, a region, a live web page, or a recording — then mark it up, compose it, and export it, without leaving the app.

Installation

HotShot comes two ways. The direct download from bendansby.com/apps/hotshot is a .dmg — open it and drag HotShot.app to your Applications folder; the build is signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple. The Mac App Store version installs and updates the usual way.

Requires macOS 15 Sequoia or later, on Apple Silicon or Intel.

Permissions

The first launch shows a permissions screen. Screen Recording is required and HotShot genuinely cannot work without it; the rest are optional and only matter if you want what they enable.

Grant them in System Settings → Privacy & Security. The screen re-checks continuously, so it lets you through the moment the required permissions are on — no relaunch needed.

The Mac App Store build asks for Screen Recording alone: it can't use Accessibility at all, so there's no Accessibility row on its permissions screen and nothing to grant.

Recording system audio isn't on the list because it needs no permission of its own — the Screen Recording access above covers the sound your Mac is playing as well as the picture.

Quick start

1. Launch HotShot. It lives in the menu bar — look for the flame icon at the top right.
2. Click the icon (or press your global shortcut) to open the capture panel.
3. Pick a capture — Screen, Window, Selection, or Web Page. Or press ⌘1 through ⌘4.
4. The shot opens in a new untitled document, on the Markup tab.
5. Annotate it. Then switch to Compose to put it on a backdrop with a title.
6. Export a PNG, copy it to the clipboard, or copy a share link.

The panel

Everything starts from one panel. It opens two ways, and they show exactly the same thing: click the menu-bar icon, or press the global keyboard shortcut you set in Settings, which floats the panel over whatever you're doing.

Six actions, each with its own shortcut while the panel is open:

Below the actions are the staging toggles and, when a recording is in prospect, the camera and microphone switches. Two buttons sit at the bottom left: one opens an empty canvas you can paste into, the other opens a saved HotShot document.

Screen

Captures a whole display. With one screen connected it shoots it straight away; with more than one it asks which you meant — see Displays.

If either staging toggle is on, HotShot cleans up first, takes the shot, and puts everything back — you never see the intermediate state in the finished image, and neither does your desktop for more than a moment.

Displays

Connect a second display and Capture Screen and Record Screen open a picker first. Every connected display is shown as a live thumbnail with its name and pixel size, and the one your menu bar is on is marked Main. Click the one you want; Esc cancels without capturing.

On a single screen there is nothing to choose, so no picker appears and nothing about the shortcuts changes — ⌘1 and ⌘5 stay one keystroke.

• Each display is captured at its own resolution. A Retina laptop driving a 1× external gives you each at its true pixel size, not one scaled to the other.
• The recording badge follows the recording. The “Recording — press Esc to stop” badge appears on the display being recorded, not on whichever one happens to be main. (In the Mac App Store build it reads “Recording — stop from the menu bar,” since Esc isn't one of its stop controls.)

Window

Opens a floating picker showing every capturable window as a live thumbnail. Click the one you want.

The picker also has a size dropdown. Choose a size and HotShot resizes that window before shooting it, so you get an exact pixel dimension rather than whatever the window happened to be. This is what the Accessibility permission is for, and it's the one capture option the Mac App Store build doesn't have — the dropdown isn't in its picker.

Selection

Dims the screen and gives you a crosshair. Drag out the region you want; release to capture it. Esc cancels.

Staging applies here too, but it's applied after you've drawn the region — you need to see the real screen to know what you're selecting.

Web page

Opens a browser window inside HotShot. Type an address, browse to what you want, and capture it as a full-length page shot.

• The address bar remembers where you've been. Start typing and it autocompletes from your HotShot browsing history. Reopening the window lands you back on the last page you loaded.
• Pick as many viewports as you like. Choose the widths you care about — phone, tablet, laptop, desktop — and HotShot shoots them all in one run, laying them out side by side, top-aligned, in a single document.
• Your viewport selection persists between sessions, so a routine set of widths is picked once.
• Open a page from your own Mac. The folder button beside Back and Forward (⇧⌘O) opens any .html file on disk — a page you're still building, a saved receipt, an exported report — with its stylesheets and images intact, ready to capture at your chosen widths.

To capture a page in your real browser — logged in, scrolled where you left it, cookie banner already dismissed — use the browser extensions instead.

Staging & delay

Two toggles on the panel clean the shot up before it's taken:

• Hide desktop icons — every file, folder, and stray download on the desktop disappears for the duration of the capture. Nothing is moved or deleted, and any Finder windows you have open are left exactly as they were.
• Hide menu bar — the menu bar collapses away, so the top edge of the shot is clean. Direct build only: it flips a system-wide macOS setting, which the sandbox blocks, so the Mac App Store build doesn't offer the switch.

Both are reversed automatically the moment the capture or recording finishes.

The Delay setting (None, 3, 5, or 10 seconds) applies to all six actions, giving you time to open a menu, hover something, or get a dialog on screen.

For a still capture the delay runs before staging; for a recording it runs after, so the desktop is already clean while you count down and is clean from the first frame. For Capture Selection the delay runs after you draw the region — you need to see the real screen to know what you're selecting.

Documents

Every capture opens an untitled document — nothing is written to disk unless you save it, and nothing lands in a temp folder you have to clean up later. A document has two tabs:

• Markup — annotate the capture itself.
• Compose — put the flattened result on a backdrop, with a title and caption.

Settings → General → Open captures on chooses which tab a new capture lands on. If you mostly want a quick arrow and out, leave it on Markup; if you mostly want a presentable image, set it to Compose.

Markup

The Markup tab is a full annotation canvas over your capture. Pick a tool from the toolbar, or press its key:

Working with what you've drawn:

• Snap to edges — the toolbar toggle turns on alignment guides that snap items to each other and to the image edges. Hold ⌘ while dragging to override the snap for one move.
• Duplicate — hold ⌥ and drag an item to leave a copy behind.
• Zoom — ⌘+ and ⌘−, or ⌘0 to fit the whole capture in the window. Scroll or two-finger swipe to pan; hold Space and drag to pan with the mouse.
• Stacking order — ⌘] brings the selection forward one step, ⌘[ sends it back one. Add ⇧ to go all the way: ⌘⇧] to the front, ⌘⇧[ to the back. The capture itself is an ordinary object too, so you can push an annotation behind it or bring it out in front.
• Undo — ⌘Z, all the way back.

A blank canvas — the left-hand button at the bottom of the capture panel — shows an empty document. Paste an image into it with ⌘V and mark that up instead.

Loupe & crop

Pixel loupe

Select the Crosshair tool and hover over the image: a magnifier follows the pointer, showing the pixels under it and the exact color value. Handy for checking a hairline, a gradient edge, or a color you need to match.

While the loupe is up (click the canvas once so it has keyboard focus):

Crop

The Crop button in the toolbar opens a crop editor over the whole canvas. Drag out the region to keep and confirm. Everything on the canvas shifts with it, so annotations stay where they belong relative to the image. Crop is undoable like anything else.

A single picture on the canvas can be cropped on its own, too, from the toolbar that appears when it's selected. It opens the same crop window — same dimming, handles and buttons — and the crop holds everywhere the shot leaves HotShot: Copy, Copy Link, Export, and the version Compose starts from.

Compose

The Compose tab takes the flattened Markup result and makes it presentable. The sidebar has two sections.

Canvas

Text content

A Title and a Caption, drawn with the composition. Autofill writes both for you from what HotShot knows about the capture — the app and window it came from, the page and viewports it shot, the date. Edit whatever it suggests.

Exporting

From Compose you can:

• Export a PNG to anywhere on disk.
• Copy the image to the clipboard and paste it straight into a message, a ticket, or a document.
• Copy a link, if you've set up a sharing destination — see Copy Link.

Exporting flattens the annotations into the image. To keep them editable instead, save the document — see Saving & reopening.

Saving & reopening

A capture is a live document: the arrows, notes and callouts are still separate objects you can move, restyle or delete. Exporting a PNG flattens them permanently. Saving keeps them.

Save and Open sit at the right-hand end of the Markup toolbar. They're buttons rather than menu items because HotShot lives in the menu bar and has no menu of its own — so there's no File menu and no ⌘S.

Save is only available when there's something to write; it goes quiet once the document matches what's on disk.

Autosave

Once a document has been saved once, HotShot keeps it up to date on its own — changes are written a couple of seconds after you stop making them, and again when you close the window. You don't have to remember to save.

The file

Documents are saved as .hotshot files. Each one holds the original capture at full resolution, every annotation, and your Compose styling — so reopening it puts you exactly where you left off, with everything still editable.

You can also start from the capture panel: the folder button at the bottom opens a saved document without needing one already on screen. Or double-click a .hotshot in the Finder — HotShot opens it whether or not it's already running.

Recording

Record Screen and Record Window take the same staging and delay options as the still captures. Record Screen asks which display to record when you have more than one — see Displays. The recording is written to ~/Movies/HotShot/ as it goes.

Turn the Camera, Microphone and System Audio switches on in the panel before you start — none of them can be added to footage afterwards. Camera and Microphone ask for permission if HotShot doesn't have it yet, and switch themselves back off if you decline, so a switch is never left on over a device that can't actually record. System Audio just goes on: there's no device to grant.

Stopping a recording

There are three ways to stop:

• Press Esc. This works for every recording, wherever you are on screen. HotShot floats a small “Recording — press Esc to stop” badge at the top of the display being recorded, for the duration, so a running recording always says so and always has one key that ends it. The badge never appears in the footage. Direct build only — see below.
• macOS's own recording indicator in the menu bar — click it and choose to stop. Recording with the synthetic cursor suppresses this indicator, so it isn't always there.
• HotShot's menu-bar icon turns into a stop button when it's the only control left — that is, when the system indicator is suppressed. Click it to stop; right-click always opens the full menu.

Review & trim

When a recording stops, a review window opens with the clip, a filmstrip, and a sidebar.

• Crop — at the top of the Canvas sidebar — opens the footage with a selection over it. Drag out the part to keep and confirm; everything else in the sidebar then frames what's left. It's a setting rather than a cut: reopen it to adjust, undo it, or use the reset arrow beside it to put the whole frame back, at any point.
• Trim by dragging the handles at either end of the filmstrip. Hover-scrub the strip to find your in and out points.
• The Playhead menu does the same from the keyboard: I and O set the start and end at the playhead, Z adds a zoom there, and ← / → step a frame (with ⇧, a second).
• The Canvas sidebar is the same treatment Compose gives a still image — backdrop (color, image, or transparent), ratio, padding, corner radius, and shadow or glow — and it's applied to the real exported video, not just the preview.
• A transparent backdrop exports with a genuine alpha channel (HEVC in a .mov) so the result drops onto a background in another app.
• Cut takes a stretch out of the middle — see Cutting.
• Undo covers everything here by name: every crop, backdrop, ratio, padding, corner, cursor, bubble, zoom, cut and trim is a step you can take back with ⌘Z.
• Save keeps the whole session so you can reopen it later — see Saved recordings. It lights up only when there is something to save, and goes quiet again if you undo back to where you were.
• Copy Link renders the same clip and uploads it, putting a shareable URL on your clipboard instead of a file on your disk — see Copy Link.

Stop cancels an export at once, whatever it's carrying — pointer, webcam, zooms — and leaves no half-written file behind.

Zoom & cursor

Zoom spans

Under the filmstrip is a thin zoom track. Drag on it to create a span — it fits the gap you draw it in rather than swallowing its neighbours — and drag the span to move it, or its ends to resize it. During a span the export zooms in and follows the pointer, which is what makes a long recording of small UI readable.

Click a span to set how far it zooms: a popover opens with a slider from 1.2× to 3×, snapping in steps of 0.2, and the span shows its level on the track. Delete lives in the same popover. New spans start at 1.8×, which is also what recordings saved before per-span levels existed keep. Clicking empty track just deselects.

Synthetic cursor

With Settings → Recording → Draw a synthetic cursor on (it's on by default), HotShot suppresses the real pointer in the recording and draws its own instead: a clean cursor that stretches along its travel, squashes across it, and trails a short comet of ghosts when it moves fast. It settles to neutral around clicks and through drags, so a click still reads as crisp and a drag follows its real path.

The pointer grows with the zoom — easing up as a span comes in and back down as it leaves, click ring and trail included — so it stays in proportion to whatever it's pointing at.

Turn it off and you get the ordinary macOS pointer, exactly as recorded.

Cutting

Trimming takes off the ends. Cutting takes a stretch out of the middle — the pause before you found the right window, the bit where you fumbled the click.

• Turn on Cut, then drag across the filmstrip. The video scrubs as you drag, so you can see what you're about to remove.
• Let go and that stretch collapses out of the clip: the two ends close together and the recording gets shorter. A thin red mark shows where it rejoined.
• Cut as many times as you like. Reset puts the whole clip back — every cut, and the trim.

A cut removes the footage from playback and from the export, not just from view. Everything travels with it: the audio, the webcam bubble, the synthetic cursor and any zoom spans all follow the shortened clip.

Saved recordings

A recording is a document. Save in the review window writes a .hotshotclip holding the whole session — and opening it later puts you back exactly where you were.

• What's in it: the footage, the webcam track, the pointer HotShot sampled while recording, your trim, your cuts, your zoom spans, and every canvas and text setting.
• The footage is copied in, not linked. A saved clip keeps working even if the original recording is later cleared from disk — which is also why the file is as large as the video inside it.
• One window per file. Opening a clip that's already open brings its window forward rather than starting a second one that would save over the first.

Open also takes plain videos — .mp4 and .mov — and drops them straight into the same window, with trim, cutting, zooms, the canvas treatment and export. A video that HotShot didn't record has no pointer to restyle and no webcam track, so those controls simply aren't shown.

Camera, microphone & system audio

All three are off by default and none of them ever blocks anything — if you never want a webcam bubble, you never have to grant camera access.

• Microphone goes straight into the recording's audio track. Pick the device in Settings → Recording.
• System audio captures what your Mac is playing — a video, a call, an app's own sound. There's no device to pick, because it's the whole output mix, and no permission to grant. HotShot's own playback is left out, so reviewing one clip while you record another doesn't bleed into the take.
• Camera records alongside the screen, and is composited in as the bubble afterwards — which is what keeps its shape, size, and position adjustable long after the recording is over.

The microphone and system audio can both be on. Narrate over the thing you're demonstrating and both land in the finished recording, and in the export — there's one Muted / Keep choice in the review window covering whatever the take captured, rather than a switch per source.

All three have quick switches in the capture panel as well as in Settings, because whether you're on camera — or taking the machine's own sound — is a decision you make when you hit record, not a preference you set once.

Browser extensions

HotShot's own web capture browses a page from scratch. The extensions exist for the one thing it can't reach: the page in your real browser — logged in, scrolled where you left it, forms filled, banner already dismissed. Click the extension and HotShot renders exactly that state.

Safari

The extension ships inside HotShot.app. Open Settings → Extensions → Safari → Open Safari Settings…, find HotShot in Safari's Extensions list, and tick it. Then click the HotShot button in Safari's toolbar on any page.

Chrome (and other Chromium browsers)

Install it from the Chrome Web Store — or open Settings → Extensions → Chrome → Get the Extension…, which opens the same listing. Works in Edge, Brave, Vivaldi and Arc too.

Chrome can't open a macOS URL directly, so HotShot installs a tiny helper alongside the app for the extension to talk to. That's automatic — nothing to configure.

Copy Link

Copy Link uploads the finished file and puts a public URL on your clipboard. It works on stills and on recordings, and appears in three places: the Markup toolbar (the annotated shot, unstyled), the Compose toolbar (the composed image), and the recording review window (the trimmed, styled clip).

Choose the destination in Settings → General → Copy links with:

The file lands in your storage in every case. HotShot doesn't host anything, so there's no service of ours to go down and nothing of yours sitting on our disk. Disconnect removes the stored sign-in from your Keychain.

Sharing a recording

In the recording review window, Copy Link sits next to Export. It renders the clip exactly as Export would — same trim, same backdrop, padding, corners and effect — then uploads that and copies the link. Progress shows as two bars, rendering and then uploading, and Stop cancels at either stage.

Nothing is left behind on your Mac: the rendered clip goes to a temporary file that's deleted as soon as the upload finishes. If you want to keep a copy, use Export instead — or as well.

Size limits

A screenshot is a couple of megabytes; a recording can be hundreds. Each destination has a ceiling:

Go over and HotShot tells you the size it came out at and the ceiling it hit, so you know how much to trim. Trimming the clip shorter is usually enough; if you want the whole thing, Export it and send the file.

One difference worth knowing: a Google Drive video link opens Drive's own player page rather than the file directly, so the recipient can stream it instead of downloading the whole thing first. A Dropbox link points straight at the file, so the recipient sees the image itself. A Google Drive link opens Drive's preview page, which shows the image with Drive's chrome around it. An iCloud Drive link opens iCloud's download page — Apple's own page, which HotShot can't change; it previews in chat as a generic iCloud card rather than as your screenshot. If you want the recipient to just see the image, use Dropbox. OneDrive links don't preview inline in Slack and similar apps — Microsoft resolves a share link through several redirects before reaching the image, and link previewers give up before the end. The link works fine when clicked; it just shows as a plain URL rather than a thumbnail. If inline previews matter to you, use one of the other three destinations.

Settings

⌘, or the menu opens Settings, in four tabs:

The global keyboard shortcut that summons the capture panel is set here too; the shortcut's keys are drawn in the panel's own header, so it's always visible.

Accessibility

HotShot works with the keyboard, VoiceOver and Voice Control:

• Every preset tile and picker is a real button. The styling tiles and the window and display pickers are reachable with Tab, and VoiceOver reads each one's name and whether it's selected.
• Icon-only buttons have spoken names, and VoiceOver can adjust a zoom span's level or delete it.
• Trim, zoom and scrub without a mouse through the recording window's Playhead menu.
• Reduce Motion swaps slides and scale-ins for fades, and Increase Contrast strengthens outlines and fills.

Updates

The direct build checks for updates automatically using Sparkle, and you can check any time via Settings → Advanced → Check for Updates…. Updates install in place.

The Mac App Store build updates through the App Store along with your other apps, so it has no updater of its own.

License

The direct build runs fully unlocked for a seven-day trial — every feature, no watermark on anything you export. After the trial, HotShot reminds you to buy a license every other capture or recording. It still doesn't watermark your work or block an export; the reminder is the nudge.

Buy from Settings → Advanced → Buy a License…, and activate with Enter License…. Activation needs the internet briefly, then works offline. A key covers the Macs you personally use. Refunded or revoked keys stop working at the next background revalidation.

The Mac App Store build has no license key and no trial — you buy it from Apple, and it's unlocked from the first launch. There's nothing to activate and no reminder to see.

Support

Questions or bug reports? Email ben.dansby@gmail.com and you'll get a reply, usually within a day or two. For privacy questions, see the privacy policy.