Snapshot
⌃⌥⌘SFreeze every display and draw on it while you talk. You can hide the overlay, switch to another window and take the next shot in the same capture.
Scribble
Screen capture for coding agents. Draw on your screen while you talk, then paste. Your agent gets the annotated screenshots and a transcript that links each mark to what you were saying.
- ⌃⌥⌘SSnapshotfreeze the screen and draw on it
- ⌃⌥⌘RWalkthroughrecord while you keep working
- ⌃⌥⌘TDictationvoice only
Free and open source. macOS, Windows and Linux.
Works with and any other agent you can paste into
How it works
-
⌃⌥⌘S takes a Snapshot: your screen freezes so you can draw on it. ⌃⌥⌘R starts a Walkthrough and keeps recording while you work. The microphone turns on with both.
-
Circle the number that is wrong, or draw an arrow to where a button should go. Each mark gets a number on the screenshot. ↩ finishes the capture.
-
A few seconds later your clipboard has the screenshots and a transcript. Paste with ⌘V. Each mark is cited at the word you were saying, with its pixel coordinates.
Shortcuts for
Three capture modes
Walkthrough
⌃⌥⌘RRecord while you keep working. Hold a modifier key to draw marks that fade like a laser pointer. Agents read images, not video, so the recording is turned into up to 30 keyframes.
Dictation
⌃⌥⌘TVoice only. Speak a prompt and paste it as plain text.
- Six tools. Arrow, box, circle, highlighter and pin make numbered marks. The pen draws freehand.
- Multiple displays. All of them are captured. In a walkthrough, each keyframe comes from the display your cursor is on.
- 4K screens. The capture adds a full-resolution crop around your marks, so small text stays readable.
- Small pastes. By default the clipboard holds the transcript and a file. Agents that read files open the images when they need them.
Your captures stay on your computer
- Transcribed on your device
- Speech is transcribed with Whisper. It runs on the Neural Engine on a Mac, and on the CPU or an NVIDIA GPU on Windows and Linux.
- Deleted after 14 days
- Captures are saved to a folder in your home directory.
- No server
- Scribble needs no account or API key and collects no usage data.
Questions
Which agents does it work with?
Any agent you can paste into. Terminals (Claude Code, Codex) take the transcript text, which lists the image files by path. Chat apps and browsers (Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor) take the attached files. If one target wants something else, the tray menu can copy any recent capture again in another format, including a single composite image.
How fast is the transcription?
The capture is transcribed while you are still talking, so after you stop only the last half minute at most is left, however long it was. That takes a second or two on an Apple Silicon Mac and a few seconds on a Windows or Linux CPU. Without an NVIDIA GPU, Windows and Linux start with a smaller model than the Mac, which is faster on a CPU and less accurate. You can pick the large one in Settings.
Does it understand languages other than English?
Yes. Settings has every language Whisper supports, and Auto-detect. English is the default.
What is different on Windows and Linux?
The modes and the output are the same. The app is a separate implementation with its own shortcuts. On Linux with X11 the capture toolbar is visible in walkthrough keyframes, and the capture tells the agent so. On Wayland only Snapshot and Dictation work, and that mode is new. Details are in the README.
Download Scribble
Free and open source under the MIT license.
- Move it to ApplicationsUnzip the download and drag Scribble into your Applications folder.
- Allow the first launchThe app is not notarized, so macOS blocks it once. Open it, then choose Open Anyway under System Settings → Privacy & Security.
- Grant two permissionsAllow Screen Recording when asked and reopen the app, then allow the Microphone.
- Run the installerIt installs for your user and needs no administrator rights.
- Confirm SmartScreenThe installer is not code-signed, so Windows asks once: More info → Run anyway.
- Find it in the trayThe app runs from an icon in the system tray. Its settings can start it at login.
Linux
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/andropar/scribble/master/python/packaging/install-linux.sh | shx86_64, Ubuntu 22.04 or newer · or get the .tar.gz
- Run the commandIt installs to
~/.localand adds a menu entry. Nothing needs root. - Start it from your app menuThe app runs from an icon in the system tray.
- Check your sessionEverything works on X11. On Wayland only Snapshot and Dictation do, started from the tray or your own shortcuts.
On first start the app downloads a speech model once (about 0.5 GB). After that it works offline. Scribble was called voice-annotate before version 0.5; updating keeps your settings, captures and models.