A screenshot tool you can read before you run it.

Freeze the screen, drag a box, draw on it. Nothing reaches your clipboard or your disk until you say so, and ⌘R hands back the text inside your selection with its indentation intact.

Read main.swift

macOS 13 or later

verify it yourself

$ wc -l main.swift 464 main.swift $ grep -vc '^[[:space:]]*$\|^[[:space:]]*//' main.swift 394 # lines that are actually code $ grep -c 'URLSession\|http' main.swift 0 # there is no network code

Those three commands are the entire pitch. Run them before you run anything else.

The gesture, on this page

macOS captures first and lets you annotate afterwards, in a window that opens somewhere else once you catch the thumbnail before it expires. Shotty puts the drawing step where the selection already is. Try it below, on a real screenshot.

A screenshot of a video page, used here as something to select and mark up

With JavaScript on this screen is live: you drag a box on it, everything outside dims, and you draw inside the box before anything is copied. Every key it demonstrates is written out in the table further down, and the source of all of it is in main.swift.

In the app the same toolbar carries Copy, Save and OCR, and the keys are P R A H for the tools, ⌘C to copy the lit region, ⌘R to read its text. Drag outside your selection to start a new one.

what ⌘C would copynothing selected

drag a box above and this fills in

Every line, accounted for

This is the whole program. Not the interesting parts of it, not a summary. All of it, grouped by what each region does. Open any row to read it right here, and check the line range against the file yourself. If it ever reaches four digits, the argument on this page stops being true and you should hold me to that.

This table is normally built in your browser from main.swift, and each row opens the source it counts. With JavaScript off, here are the same numbers as plain text — and wc -l main.swift checks them without trusting this page at all.

Region

Lines

Code

Imports and settings

1–14

Overlay state and init

15–44

Drawing the overlay

45–131

Mouse: select and annotate

132–179

Keyboard

180–203

Toolbar

204–262

Export: copy and save

263–287

OCR

288–387

Window and capture

388–436

Global hotkey

437–444

App and launch

445–464

main.swift

1–464

394

OCR that keeps the columns

Vision returns recognised text as a bag of bounding boxes, so the obvious implementation pastes back a flattened blob. Shotty estimates character width from the median box and maps every fragment to a column, so indentation and column gaps survive. That reconstruction is 45 lines, in Overlay.layout(_:); the whole OCR path is 80.

the lit selectionmain.swift:366–377

var text = "" for p in row { let col = Int((p.x / charW).rounded()) // column from the left edge if col > text.count { text += String(repeating: " ", count: col - text.count) } else if !text.isEmpty { text += " " } text += p.s } out.append(text) }

⌘R → your clipboardplain text

Character for character, column for column. With JavaScript on, the reconstruction above runs in your browser and checks that identity itself.

The column mapping above is that function ported to JS, running here on fragments that carry the noise Vision actually returns. It leaves out the paragraph-break pass, which this sample has nothing to exercise. Step through it yourself.

⌘R → your clipboardselectable text

Small selections are upscaled 2× before recognition, and language correction is off by default so it stops "fixing" your identifiers. One flag at the top of the file turns it back on if you mostly capture prose.

Install

There is no signed installer yet. You build it, which takes a few seconds and means you can read what you are running first.

Get the command line tools if you don't have them.xcode-select --install
Clone and build. build.sh is 22 lines: an Info.plist, swiftc, and an ad-hoc codesign so the Screen Recording grant survives rebuilds.git clone https://github.com/uuu4/shotty.git cd shotty && ./build.sh && open Shotty.app
Grant Screen Recording on the first capture: System Settings → Privacy & Security → Screen Recording. Then open it once more. Shotty lives in the menu bar as ✂︎, with no Dock icon. macOS 13 or later.

Or the whole of it in one line, once you have read what it runs:

git clone https://github.com/uuu4/shotty.git && cd shotty && ./build.sh && open Shotty.app

Keys

`⌘⇧2`	capture
drag	select a region; drag outside it to reselect
`P` `R` `A` `H`	pen · rectangle · arrow · highlighter
`⌘Z`	undo the last stroke
`⌘C` `Return`	copy the selection to the clipboard
`⌘S`	save it to the Desktop
`⌘R`	OCR the selection to the clipboard
`Esc`	cancel