Shotate

Most screenshots need one thing pointed out before they go anywhere. I wanted a tool with the annotation you actually use and nothing else: no account, no upsell, no nag screens. So I built it. Press a shortcut, drag, add an arrow, press Return. It's tested on the Mac, and Windows and Linux have preview builds.

The capture is saved and on the clipboard the moment you take it, so closing the editor never loses anything. An image you open is never overwritten. Edits go to a copy beside it.

It used to be called Snapmark. So did a lot of other screenshot tools, so I gave it a name of its own: Shotate, screenshot and annotate in one word. Updating keeps your settings and permissions.

What it does well

Shotate lives in the menu bar or the system tray and stays out of the way. Editing works like a canvas: a new mark is selected as soon as you draw it, handles resize it, Delete removes it, and Esc steps back one level at a time before it copies and closes. Redaction draws a solid bar instead of a blur, because blur and pixelation can sometimes be reversed.

It has no analytics and no account, and your screenshots stay on your computer. The only network request is a once-a-day update check, which you can turn off.

How it is built

There are two apps that follow the same rules. On macOS it is a native Swift and AppKit app. On Windows and Linux it is a Tauri app, with Rust handling capture, the tray and global shortcuts and a TypeScript canvas editor for the marks. Both keep the drawing model separate from the windows so it is unit-tested, and both draw the live editor and the exported PNG with the same renderer. What you see is exactly what gets copied.

One config file format works everywhere, so settings written on a Mac carry over unchanged.