Excerpt

A macOS screenshot tool that can cut the middle out of a screenshot. Keep a spreadsheet's header rows and its totals, drop the thousand rows between, and the join is marked with a torn seam. It works across columns too, and on long scrolling captures of web pages and forms.

It also does everything you'd expect of a screenshot tool: area, window, fullscreen and scrolling capture, copying the text out of a capture, an editor for arrows, text and highlights, and screen recordings small enough for GitHub, Slack and Google Chat, with your shortcuts and clicks drawn in.

Install

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/lockyc/excerpt/main/install.sh | bash

Needs macOS 15 or later. The installer downloads the latest release, checks that it is signed by Excerpt's developer and notarized by Apple, then installs /Applications/Excerpt.app and starts it in the menu bar. It asks for your password only when /Applications isn't writable. Excerpt then updates itself: it checks daily, and Check for Updates… in its menu checks now.

Uninstall: quit Excerpt, delete /Applications/Excerpt.app, run defaults delete com.lockyc.excerpt, and remove Excerpt from Screen Recording, Accessibility and Input Monitoring in System Settings → Privacy & Security. Your captures stay where they were saved.

First run

• Screen Recording — the first capture asks for it (System Settings → Privacy & Security → Screen & System Audio Recording); reopen Excerpt after granting it.
• Accessibility — only for scrolling capture's auto-scroll. Scrolling the region yourself doesn't need it.
• Input Monitoring — only to draw the shortcuts you press into a recording; without it a clip shows clicks only.
• macOS's own screenshot shortcuts hold ⌘⇧3 to ⌘⇧5 until you turn them off in System Settings → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts → Screenshots, or rebind Excerpt's in its Settings. Excerpt's menu flags any shortcut macOS still holds.

Features

Default hotkey	Capture
⌘⇧3	Window
⌘⇧4	Area (the screen freezes while you select)
⌘⇧5	Text — OCR and QR codes straight to the clipboard, no file
⌘⇧6	Select an area, adjust it, then pick area, scrolling, text, window, fullscreen or record from a bar over it
⌘⇧7	Record — select an area, click a window or press F for the display, then Return; ⌘⇧7 again stops
⌥4	Recent Captures — your last seven captures in a floating panel: click copies, double-click opens, drag it out, hover to edit

• Every capture is saved to ~/Documents/Screenshots/, copied to the clipboard and shown as a thumbnail with Edit and Close; clicking the thumbnail opens it. Files older than 30 days move into YYYY/MM-Month/ folders, names unchanged. Both are settings.

• Scrolling capture stitches as you go; your own scrolling takes over from auto-scroll at any point.

• The editor keeps the original and your edits in a separate … original.png, so a capture reopened from Recent Captures is still editable. Cut and blurred content never reaches the saved file. Save (⌘S) saves, copies the image and closes.

  Tool	Key	What it does
  Select	V	Select, move and restyle items; a selected item's colour, size and options float beside it
  Arrow	A	An arrow
  Rectangle	R	A rectangle outline
  Path	P	Click or freehand lines and outlines, optionally filled
  Text	T	Plain or on a background of its colour, any size, bold, Sans, Mono or Serif; placed on the capture's own text, it matches that text's size, weight, font and colour
  Step	N	Numbered markers that carry on across captures edited together
  Highlight	H	A translucent highlight over a region
  Blur	B	Blurs a region
  Patch	E	Conceals text with the colour around it
  Replace	X	Patches a recognised line and lets you retype it in the same size, weight and colour
  Crop	K	Crops
  Cut	C	Drag across rows or columns to remove them; the join becomes a torn seam

  The colour control's eyedropper samples any colour from the capture. Border frames the image in a line of your colour and width, outside its edge. Drawing past the edge grows the picture to hold it.

  

• A series. Captures taken in a row open together from the newest thumbnail's Edit All, or by choosing several in Open Capture…: one editor, a filmstrip along the bottom, ⌘[ / ⌘] between them. Save writes them all and copies every image, in order.

• Recording starts after a 3-2-1 countdown. A bar at the bottom of the area has Pause, Stop and Discard. A recording stops at 5 minutes, and is saved as a GIF fitted to GitHub's 10 MB limit or as an MP4 (a setting; one too long for the GIF is saved as MP4). The full-resolution … original.mov is kept beside it. Its Edit trims, blurs the whole clip or a span of it, turns the drawn shortcuts and clicks on or off, and switches between GIF and MP4.

Limits

• Capture Text reads side-by-side columns on one background across, line by line, so their text interleaves.
• Scrolling capture stops on pages with large animations or video.
• A recording covers one display; a recorded window is the fixed area it covered when you clicked it; a recording's blurs stay where they're drawn rather than following moving content.
• Esc cancels a recording only during the countdown. After that it belongs to the app you're recording, so Discard throws a recording away.

Status

In use, 0.x. What's planned: docs/roadmap.md.

Related

glance, the image viewer, hands PNGs to Excerpt's editor with E.

Development

Needs Xcode or the Command Line Tools with Swift 6, just and shellcheck.

git clone https://github.com/lockyc/excerpt && cd excerpt
just gate     # shellcheck, format check, build, tests
just run      # build the signed app and launch it
just install  # build, install to /Applications and launch

Builds sign with a Developer ID Application identity from your keychain; set APPLE_SIGNING_IDENTITY when there is more than one. APPLE_SIGNING_IDENTITY=- just run signs ad hoc, and macOS then asks for Screen Recording again after each rebuild. Architecture, conventions and the release process: CLAUDE.md.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.