annotate

Native macOS screen annotation tool. Draw over your live screen on a transparent full-screen overlay, with a floating toolbar — present, teach, or mark up anything on screen.

A lightweight, zero-dependency alternative to Presentify.

Features

• Pen, eraser, text, and pointer tools
• Smooth freehand strokes (quadratic curve smoothing)
• 6 colors, adjustable line width
• Grid overlay (NxM) and binary tree overlay
• Full-screen whiteboard mode
• Click-through mode — keep your drawings on screen while you interact with apps underneath
• Customizable keyboard shortcuts (menu-bar Shortcuts… window, persisted)
• Multi-monitor support (one overlay per screen)
• Undo/redo with full history (drag moves included)
• Global hotkey activation

Requirements

• macOS 13+
• No Screen Recording permission needed — annotations draw on a transparent overlay above your live windows.

Install

make install   # builds and copies to ~/Applications

Direct swiftc build with the macOS SDK. No Xcode or SPM required.

Usage

Press Ctrl+Shift+D to start a session — a toolbar appears and you draw over your live screen. Press it again to stop. While a session is active, press Ctrl+Shift+F to toggle click-through: your drawings stay visible but the mouse passes through to the apps underneath, so you can scroll/click and then resume drawing.

Keyboard Shortcuts (defaults — all remappable)

Key	Action
Ctrl+Shift+D	Toggle annotation session
Ctrl+Shift+F	Toggle click-through (draw ↔ interact)
P / E / T / M	Pen / Eraser / Text / Pointer
1-6	Colors (red, blue, green, yellow, white, black)
[ / ]	Decrease / increase line width
G	Add grid overlay
B	Add binary tree overlay
W	Toggle full-screen whiteboard
C	Clear all
Backspace	Delete selected item
Cmd+Z / Cmd+Shift+Z	Undo / Redo
ESC	Cancel placement mode

All shortcuts except Undo/Redo/Delete/ESC can be remapped from the menu-bar Shortcuts… window (⌘,); bindings persist across launches.

License

MIT