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

Opening it the first time

Skribble is signed, but not notarized — that needs a paid Apple Developer subscription. So macOS will block the first launch and say it cannot verify the app is free of malware. Three clicks and it never asks again.

  1. 01

    Open it once

    Drag Skribble to Applications and double-click. Let the warning appear, then dismiss it.

  2. 02

    System Settings → Privacy & Security

    Scroll to Security. There is a line about Skribble, with an Open Anyway button.

  3. 03

    Confirm

    Click Open. macOS remembers, and it launches normally from then on.

Or skip all of that and build it yourself:

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

Go draw on something.

Download for macOSTell me what's broken