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How FletchShot works

FletchShot lives in your menu bar. The flow is three steps — shoot, mark up, hand off. Press ⌥⌘4 (changeable in Settings), drag over what you want, draw on it, then grab the tab at the bottom edge of the window and drop it anywhere.

First run

Permissions

Screen Recording permission

On first launch FletchShot shows a short guide. Click Open System Settings, allow FletchShot under System Settings › Privacy & Security › Screen Recording, then relaunch the app as the guide suggests.

Even after you allow it, macOS occasionally shows a dialog asking whether FletchShot may keep accessing your screen and audio. This is macOS behavior that applies to all screen-recording apps, not a FletchShot issue — choose to allow and carry on.

Microphone permission — only if you narrate recordings

The first time you turn the mic on for a screen recording, macOS asks for permission. To change it later, allow FletchShot under System Settings › Privacy & Security › Microphone.

Captures fail or come out black?

That is almost always the Screen Recording permission. Check that it is granted, and relaunch the app after changing it.

Shoot

Capturing

Everything lives in the menu bar icon:

• Select an area — or just press ⌥⌘4, then drag.
• Repeat last area — re-shoot exactly the same spot. Great for before/after.
• Full screen / Window — one click each.
• Self-timer — capture after a short delay, for menus and hover states.
• Open image… — annotate an existing image file.
• Scrolling Capture — turn a long page into one tall image by scrolling it yourself. See Scrolling Capture.

One tall image

Scrolling Capture

Choose Capture Scrolling from the menu bar and mark the area. Then scroll the window yourself, by hand. FletchShot takes a low-rate burst as you move, matches the rows against each other, and stitches everything into one tall image. Press Return to finish, Esc to abandon; the finished image opens straight in the annotation window.

A small circle floats in the lower part of the frame while you scroll. A spinning white arc means it's following you. If the circle turns red and says "Scroll back a little," go back to what you'd already captured — roughly half a screen of overlap — and then move down slowly again — the moment the overlap is picked up, the circle goes white and the stitch continues. If a small step back doesn't clear the red, go back further; there's no penalty for overshooting. Jumping to the top of the page with ⌘↑ works reliably too. If you push past into territory it never saw, that part simply isn't captured.

The one trick: stroke slowly, and always keep a little overlap. A hard flick throws the overlap away and turns the circle red. No extra permission is needed — Scrolling Capture uses only the Screen Recording permission and never sends synthetic keys or scroll events. You can bind a hotkey in Settings › Capture & Recording (unassigned by default; pressing the same key again while recording confirms).

What it's good at, and what it isn't

Fit	Page	What happens
◎	Chat logs (Slack, Discord and friends), pricing and comparison tables, terminals and editors, ordinary long articles	Stroke at a normal pace and it stitches all the way through. We've measured single stitches past 80,000 pixels.
△	Image-heavy pages, pages with lazy-loaded content, or a moment when you flicked too hard	The circle may go red for a few seconds while images finish loading — it recovers on its own, and scrolling back a little always brings it back.
×	Pages that are mostly code blocks with many visually identical lines, and infinite-scroll feeds like X where the content itself keeps swapping in	There isn't enough to match on, or the page changes under your fingers. The red circle appears often enough that some stretches won't be captured. And on pages of long, repetitive lists — reference sections and the like — a fast wheel flick can occasionally produce a stitch that looks seamless but has skipped a stretch in the middle. Take the page in a couple of separate shots instead, and give the finished image a quick look before you use it.

If a stitch doesn't come out, hit Esc and try again a little slower. The finished image stays on this Mac, like every other capture.

Mark up

Annotating

Every capture opens in the annotation window. Eight tools, no sub-menus to study:

• Arrow — the signature tapered arrow.
• Text — click and type.
• Shapes — rectangle, ellipse, straight line.
• Draw — pen and highlighter.
• Stamps — ✓ ✕ ? ! ♥.
• Numbers — a counter stamp that increments on every click.
• Mosaic — blur out what shouldn't be seen.
• Crop — trim the capture (stills only).

Color and size are remembered per tool — set them once and they stay.

Hand off

Getting it where it needs to go

• Drag tab — grab the tab at the bottom edge and drop straight into Slack, mail, a browser or a Finder folder.
• Copy — ⌘C. Or ⇧⌘C to copy and close in one stroke.
• Save — ⌘S. In Settings you choose: ask every time, or save silently into a fixed folder.
• Send to Shortcuts — hand the result to a macOS Shortcut for your own automation.

Record

Screen recording and GIF

Choose Record screen from the menu bar. A control bar appears: drag to pick an area and press ●, or start immediately. Stop with ⌥⌘4 — the same key you shoot with.

After recording, switch between MP4 and GIF in the footer of the window. The mic is a single 🎤 toggle on the control bar; quality and mic volume live in Settings.

The clip opens in the annotation window, ready for arrows and cuts — see Drawing on and trimming video.

Video

Drawing on and trimming video

Pause the video and the toolbar appears — draw with the same tools you use on stills (Crop is the one that stays stills-only). While paused you can also drag any annotation to move it, or grab its handles to reshape it. On export, everything is baked into the file.

When an annotation appears

An annotation shows from the moment you placed it until the end of the clip. To change that, select it: a pink range bar appears above the footer. Drag its ends to set when the annotation appears and disappears; scrub with the playhead below the bar to check the exact frames.

Trimming — the ends and the middle

Press the scissors in the footer to open the trim bar:

• Trim the ends — drag the handles at either edge.
• Cut the middle — drag across the bar to select a stretch, then hit the Cut chip (or Delete). The stretch turns dark red. Add as many as you like, and fine-tune each one by dragging its edges.
• Confirm with ✓ or Enter; Esc cancels. Confirming a trim clears the annotations on the clip — you're warned first, and the undo button brings back both the footage and the annotations, one step at a time.

Mosaic on video

Drag a rectangle over a name, an address, a notification — it is pixelated live, in the preview and in the exported file. Its time range is adjustable like any annotation, and arrows drawn on top of it stay sharp.

Handing off a video

With annotations on the clip, the first click on the drag tab starts the bake — the footer shows progress — and when it finishes, drag as usual. Save, copy, and share wait for the bake on their own. In GIF mode the conversion follows the bake; every route hands over the GIF once it's ready.

And three more

Pin, OCR, history

• Pin (⌘P) — float the capture above every window while you work.
• Recognize text — in the Edit menu. Copies the text inside the image to your clipboard.
• Capture history — recent originals, reachable from the menu bar. Stored only on this Mac, never uploaded. Can be turned off in Settings.

Shortcuts

Keys and recipes

Action	Key
Capture / stop recording	⌥⌘4 (changeable in Settings)
Capture in a new window	⇧⌥⌘4
Save	⌘S
Copy	⌘C
Copy and close	⇧⌘C
Pin	⌘P

Recipes

• Re-shoot the same spot: Repeat last area → one arrow → drag tab into Slack. The second shot is where the speed shows.
• Explain motion with a GIF: Record screen → ⌥⌘4 to stop → switch to GIF in the footer → drag tab into the chat.
• Cut a flub out of a recording: scissors → drag across the bad stretch → Cut → Enter. No re-recording.
• Text from a screenshot: Capture a window → Recognize text → paste.