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Menu bar tool for macOS

ShotClip

One less step, a thousand times a day.

LiveSwiftAppKitHomebrewView CodeView Demo

The problem

macOS either saves a screenshot to a file or copies it to the clipboard. Anyone who needs both — stored and ready to paste — takes the screenshot twice or digs the file out of the folder.

The obvious workarounds all fall short: custom shortcuts have to be memorised, screen recording permissions are far too broad for this purpose, and nobody wants a subscription or an Electron app for such a small step.

The menu in the menu bar: copy as image or file, instant capture, pause.
The menu in the menu bar: copy as image or file, instant capture, pause.

How it works

  1. 01The native shortcuts stay untouched — macOS captures and saves exactly as before.
  2. 02A watcher on the screenshot folder reports every finished file within milliseconds.
  3. 03The finished file goes to the clipboard, either as an image or as a file.
  4. 04Distributed via Homebrew, so installing and updating is a single command.

The decisions behind it

The interesting part is not the copying but the detection: when is a screenshot finished?

Folder watcher instead of Spotlight. Earlier versions queried the Spotlight index. It took one to two seconds for a new file to appear — noticeably too slow. A watcher directly on the folder reports it immediately.

Waiting for the rename. macOS first writes a hidden temporary file and only renames it once the image is complete. That rename is what gets waited for, so a half-written image never reaches the clipboard.

Slow backstop poll. Events can occasionally be missed. A lazy background check catches those cases without generating constant load.

The settings stay deliberately small. Every option has to earn its place.
The settings stay deliberately small. Every option has to earn its place.

Where it stands

A tool you stop noticing once it is set up: press the shortcut, and the screenshot is in the folder and on the clipboard. Distributed via Homebrew, open source under the MIT licence.

The one-to-two-second wait of the Spotlight version is the reason the current solution exists — the difference between “it works” and “it stays out of the way”.

One command to install, no new shortcuts, no extra permissions.

Learnings

The fastest solution was not the most obvious one. The system index is convenient but too sluggish for instant reactions.

A small tool must not cost attention. Any setting that does not earn its place stays out.