One shortcut. Capture, mark up, copy, continue.

A menu-bar screenshot tool for macOS and Windows, written in Rust against each platform's native APIs. No Electron, no account, no uploads.

Download What it does

macOS 13 or later (Intel and Apple silicon) · Windows 10/11 (x64) · free and open source

Ctrl+Alt+A → drag a rectangle → box it, arrow it, blur it, label it → Return → it is on your clipboard

What it does

The screen freezes the moment you press the shortcut, so nothing moves while you frame the shot. Everything after that happens on the frozen image.

Mark it up

Rectangle, ellipse, arrow, freehand pen, mosaic and text. Marks stay editable: drag one to move it, drag a grip to resize it, double-click a label to retype it. Undo and redo throughout.

Snap to a window

Hover any window and the whole thing is offered, framed exactly — no shadow, no stray desktop at the edges. One click takes it.

Pixel-exact edges

A magnifier follows the pointer with a crosshair on the exact pixel and a readout of its position and colour. Nearest-neighbour, so you can count individual pixels.

Send to a phone

Optional, and off until you turn it on. Serves one image on your own local network behind an unguessable address that expires on its own. Scan the QR code and it is on the other device.

Blur out a password

The mosaic brush pixelates what it covers, in the finished image and not just on screen. Freehand marks are fixed once drawn — a mosaic that could be dragged larger would stop covering what it was drawn to hide.

19 languages

The interface follows your system's language, or you can pick one in settings. English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and fifteen more.

Key	What happens
`Ctrl`+`Alt`+`A`	Freeze the screen and start a selection
hover a window	The whole window is offered, ready to be taken with one click
`Return`	Copy to the clipboard and close
`⌘S` / `Ctrl`+`S`	Copy and open “Save as”
`⌘Z` / `Ctrl`+`Z`	Undo — add `⇧` to redo
`Esc`	Cancel. Nothing is copied, nothing is written

Download

Version 0.9.0. The same build for everyone — there is no “pro” edition and nothing to sign in to.

macOS

Universal · Apple silicon and Intel · macOS 13 or later

Download .dmg

870 KB

Windows

64-bit · Windows 10 and 11

Download .exe

750 KB · portable, no installer

Your system will warn you the first time. Here is why.

LiteCap is not code-signed yet — a signing certificate is a yearly fee this project has not taken on. Nothing is wrong with the download; your operating system simply cannot tell who built it.

macOS: the first launch is refused. Open System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll to the bottom, and press Open Anyway. Once only.

Windows: SmartScreen shows a blue dialog. Click More info → Run anyway. The first time you use “send to a device”, Windows will also ask whether to allow it through the firewall — that is the local server described below.

You can verify what you downloaded against the checksums in the macOS manifest or the Windows manifest.

Privacy

Short version: LiteCap reaches the network in exactly two places, and both of them are a button you pressed.

Nothing is uploaded: There is nowhere for a screenshot to go: no account, no server of ours, no relay. A local delivery goes from your machine to your other device directly and leaves no copy anywhere.
Nothing is collected: No telemetry, no analytics, no crash reporting, no identifier. An update check is a plain GET of a text file; it reports no version, no identifier and no usage. What a server learns is what any web server sees — that some address asked for a file.
No history is kept: A capture lives in memory long enough to be encoded onto the clipboard, then its buffer is zeroed and freed. Nothing records what you captured, when, or where you sent it.
Nothing is written to disk: Unless you pick a path in “Save as” yourself. No temp file, no auto-save folder, no cache. LiteCap also never reads your files: the only path it touches is one you choose in a system dialog, plus its own optional config file.
No admin rights: On Windows it asks for no permission at all. On macOS it asks for exactly one — Screen Recording, without which no screenshot tool can work — and deliberately not Accessibility, which would let it see every keystroke you type.
The two network calls: “Check for Updates” in the menu, and “Send to a device” if you turn it on. No timer, no launch-time ping, no background thread.

One caveat rather than a promise: a local delivery travels unencrypted on your own network. Anyone on the same network who guesses the address within its two-minute window could read the image. LiteCap says so in the panel itself, every time you use it.