GW
macOS · free · open source

Your screen isthe canvas
not just a window.

Skribble is a paint app with everything you expect — shapes, arrows, a fill bucket, text. Then you press ⌃⌥⌘D and the app disappears, leaving you free to draw on top of anything on your Mac. Circle the button. Arrow the bug. Cross out the bad paragraph.

Download for macOSRead the source

macOS 14 or later · Apple silicon

Go on. Draw on it.

This is a real drawing surface, running in your browser. The app does exactly this — on top of every window you have open.

tools

Push your pointer to the left edge of that panel — the tools slide out, exactly as they do on your desktop.

the whole point

Stop saying “the button on the left”

Draw the circle instead. One shortcut puts a transparent layer over every display you own — your apps keep running underneath, untouched. Annotate a spreadsheet mid-call, mark up a design without opening a design tool, or teach someone where to click by actually pointing at it.

  • Click-through. Keep scrolling and clicking the apps beneath while your marks float on top.
  • Every display. One layer spans all your screens, so you never lose the pen halfway across.
  • Dim the room. Drop the brightness behind your annotations when you are presenting.
  • Keep it. Save as a transparent PNG or PDF, or bake it onto a screenshot.
click this one
pencilhighlighterlinearrowrectanglerounded rectellipsetrianglestarfill buckettexteraserselectpencilhighlighterlinearrowrectanglerounded rectellipsetrianglestarfill buckettexteraserselect

Everything you'd expect. Nothing you wouldn't.

Draw properly

Pencil, highlighter, line, arrow, rectangle, rounded rectangle, ellipse, triangle, star, text. Hold ⇧ to lock lines to 45° and boxes to squares.

Fill anything

Grab the bucket and click inside any shape — outline or middle, filled or not. ⌥-click clears it again. Click bare canvas to repaint the whole page.

Export sharp

PNG and JPEG at 2×, and true vector PDF — because everything is vector, nothing softens when you scale it.

Undo everything

Two hundred levels of history, covering shapes, fills and the page colour. Select, drag, resize from the handles, delete.

Stays out of the way

Lives in your menu bar. Global shortcuts work from any app. No Screen Recording permission unless you save a screenshot.

Yours to read

A few thousand lines of Swift, no dependencies, MIT-spirited and on GitHub. Build it yourself in about ten seconds.

From anywhere

  • ⌃⌥⌘D start or stop drawing on screen
  • ⌃⌥⌘P let clicks through to the apps below
  • ⌃⌥⌘E wipe every annotation

While drawing

  • Esc exit · ⌘Z undo · ⌘C copy
  • p pencil · a arrow · f fill · t text
  • o ellipse · r rectangle · e eraser

Installing it

Open the disk image, drag Skribble to your Applications folder, and launch it. That is the whole procedure.

It is signed with a Developer ID, notarized by Apple and stapled, so macOS verifies it on the way in and opens it without a warning — offline too, since the notarization ticket ships inside the app rather than being fetched.

Or build it from source, which takes about ten seconds and pulls in no dependencies:

git clone https://github.com/GeroWalther/skribble.git
cd skribble && ./build.sh --run

Go draw on something.

Download for macOSTell me what's broken