The Annotation Editor

Opening the editor

The editor opens automatically right after a capture (when "Preview in Editor" is on in Preferences, which is the default). You can also open it directly with File › New from Clipboard (⌘N) or Open Image… (⌘O). For a faster path when you only need one arrow and a copy, use Quick Markup instead — the small floating panel that opens from a capture's own Annotate button, with a curated arrow/rectangle/highlight/blur/text toolset and Copy/Save/Open-in-Editor, without opening the full editor window.

The drawing tools

Every tool below is one-key selectable, undoable, and persists into the project file if you save as .screencap:

• Arrow — a tapered head by default; drag a third handle to bend the shaft into a curve, and the head follows the tangent.
• Rectangle / Ellipse / Line — gently rounded corners on shapes, with a subtle depth shadow.
• Highlight — multiplies over the content underneath, like a real highlighter.
• Blur / Pixelate — redacts sensitive information; the blur radius scales with the size of the region you draw, so small redactions don't look weaker than large ones.
• Text — has its own font-size control in the inspector (a real point size, separate from stroke weight), and can sit on a rounded, auto-contrast chip so it stays legible over busy screenshots.
• Step — filled, numbered badges for how-to guides; deleting one badge automatically resequences the rest (1, 3 → 1, 2).
• Freehand — draw arbitrary strokes.
• Spotlight — dims everything outside the shape to draw attention to one area.
• Sticky note — a note block placed on the canvas.
• Callout — a speech bubble with a draggable tail handle and auto-contrast, centered text.
• Magnifier — an in-place zoom lens, 1.5–4× via a contextual Zoom row in the inspector, for calling out a detail without cropping it out separately.
• Measure — a ruler with end ticks and a live "N px" pill showing the true capture-pixel distance, not an on-screen approximation.
• Stamps — a flyout of curated symbol stamps (check, warning, star, pin, and more), tinted to match your current tool color. Click to place at a default size, or drag to size it as you place it.

Stroke styles

Rectangles, ellipses, lines, and arrows can render solid, dashed, or as a dashed arrow — dash patterns scale with stroke weight, and arrowheads always stay solid for clarity. There's also a hand-drawn "sketchy" stroke option, styled with a genuine double-pass jitter rather than a filter effect. All of it is per-annotation, undoable, and round-trips through a saved project.

Reshaping the canvas itself

Unlike the drawing tools above, these operate on the image itself — but they're still undoable, since the editor snapshots the full document state (base image + annotations + background) on every change:

• Crop — trims the canvas to a selected region; annotations rebase to the new coordinates.
• Cut-out — removes a full row or column band and splices the remaining halves together with a dashed perforation seam, useful for compressing a tall screenshot without cropping content off the ends.
• Resize — scales the image and its annotations together via an anchored, aspect-locked popover.

Color, contrast, and repeat styling

The color control is a chip plus hex readout that opens a popover with a swatch grid, a hex field, and an eyedropper. Its contrast readout shows the WCAG ratio and an AA pass/fail against both white and black text, right where you're picking the color — useful when you're annotating over a screenshot with an unpredictable background. Quick Styles remember your last-used colors, so consecutive annotations default to matching your previous one instead of resetting every time.

Selecting and editing annotations

• Multi-select — marquee-drag over empty canvas, or shift-click individual shapes; ⌘A selects everything. Move or delete the group together; the color/stroke inspector still acts on a single shape at a time.
• Resize handles — a single selected shape shows eight bounding-box handles for area shapes (drag a corner or edge), or two endpoint handles for lines, arrows, and the ruler.
• Snapping — dragging an annotation snaps to the canvas edges and to other annotations, with Figma-style alignment guides.
• Nudging — arrow keys move the selection 1px at a time, 10px with Shift held.
• Duplicate, copy, paste, cut — ⌘D duplicates; ⌘C/⌘V/⌘X copy, paste, and cut annotations, including pasting into a different editor window.
• Right-click canvas menu — Edit Text, Duplicate, Delete, Bring to Front, Send to Back.
• Double-click a text, sticky note, or callout to re-edit its label directly; Esc reverts the edit.

Undo covers everything

Undo/redo snapshots the full document state, so crop, cut-out, and resize are undoable just like drawing a shape — they used to be destructive-and-permanent. It also covers inspector changes (opacity, zoom, step numbering), background changes, and text re-edits: re-editing a label or deleting text down to empty is undoable rather than silently lost.

Getting text back out, and finishing up

• The toolbar's one-click Copy Text (OCR) action grabs the recognized text from the image straight to your clipboard, without leaving the editor.
• A bottom zoom bar (−, slider, +, percentage, Fit) plus ⌘+/⌘−/⌘0 and trackpad pinch control canvas zoom; 100% means fit-to-window.
• The editor window remembers the size you leave it at, while still fitting itself to a new capture's dimensions.
• Finish with Copy, Save (⌘S), Open, or the system share sheet — same as any native macOS document window.