Shottr

Promptfree, for everyone, and the only version there is

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Build me a screenshot tool that replaces Shottr — and know why this is ALMOST.

The product costs about the price of a coffee and its whole appeal is **native capture at native speed**: the overlay appears instantly, the editor is already open, and nothing is ever waiting. Reproducing that means writing native code and caring about milliseconds. It is a small project, but not a web one — and the honest saving is tiny.

STACK
- Native: Swift and AppKit on macOS with ScreenCaptureKit, or the platform equivalent elsewhere
- SQLite on device for history
- No server, no account, no network. A screenshot tool that uploads by default is a screenshot tool that leaks
- Optional: a small upload server if you want links

THE SPEED, WHICH IS THE PRODUCT
- Shortcut to a visible selection overlay: under 50 milliseconds. The process stays resident and the overlay is pre-built, not created on demand
- Selection to an open editor with the image already in it: instant. No file dialogue, no spinner, no save step
- Treat any regression as the highest-severity bug. Everything else in this tool is ordinary; the speed is why it is bought

CAPTURE
- Area, window, full screen, and — the one people use most — repeat the last area. That shortcut is frequently missing and frequently missed
- Area selection with the dimensions shown, edges snapping to window boundaries, adjustable before confirming, and a magnifier at the cursor for pixel-accurate edges
- Window capture with or without the shadow, chosen in settings
- A delay and a mode that keeps a menu open while you select
- Capture at the display's real resolution with the scale factor stored, so a high-density screenshot is not a blurry mess when pasted elsewhere
- **Scrolling capture**: capture, scroll, capture, and stitch. Match on overlapping rows by correlation rather than a fixed scroll amount, or the seams show. Detect and exclude fixed headers, which otherwise repeat down the image. This is the hardest thing in the tool and one of the reasons people choose it

THE EDITOR
- Opens with the capture in it. Tools: arrow, rectangle, ellipse, line, freehand, text, numbered step markers, highlighter, blur, pixelate, crop
- Everything is an object until it is exported: move it, restyle it, delete it, undo it. An annotation you cannot adjust means starting again
- **Redaction that redacts**: the pixels underneath are destroyed in the exported file, not covered by a shape that can be peeled off in another editor. This is how people leak things
- Colour, thickness and font remembered per tool
- Background, padding, rounded corners and a shadow for the screenshots that go into documentation

THE SMALL FEATURES THAT MAKE IT
- Measure a distance in pixels on screen, and pick a colour with a magnifier — both trivial to build and disproportionately useful
- Text recognition on the capture, on device, so text in a screenshot can be copied. Never sent anywhere
- Compare two captures with a difference view
- Copy to clipboard always, as well as saving

SAVING AND SHARING
- Every capture saved locally to a folder with a template-named file, automatically. Nothing depends on an upload
- History browsable in the application, searchable over recognised text
- If you add uploading: your own server, signed uploads from the app, expiring links, real deletion, and an obvious indicator of which mode you are in. Local must remain the default

OPERATIONS
- Preferences in a plain file
- The screen recording permission requested with a plain explanation
- No telemetry. Not one event

WHAT MATTERS MOST
The 50 milliseconds and real redaction. Get from shortcut to annotated capture without ever waiting, and confirm a blurred region is destroyed rather than covered — then do scrolling capture, which is a fortnight on its own.