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Screenshots

⇧⌘X selects a region and gets a screenshot with OCR text attached.

Press ⇧ ⌘ X anywhere, or pick Take Screenshot from the Gisti menu bar icon. The screen dims, you drag a region, and the capture lands in the Stream, with its text already recognized.

Capture flow

  1. ⇧ ⌘ X – the selection overlay appears over everything, including full-screen apps. An on-screen hint bar shows the keys below for the duration of the capture.

  2. Drag to select a region, or use one of the keys while the overlay is up:

    Key Effect
    Space Toggle Area vs Window mode – click a whole window instead of dragging a region (see below)
    Tab Toggle Image vs Text capture – see below
    ⏎ Capture the entire screen
    Esc Cancel (right-click also cancels)

  3. The two toggles are independent and combine freely: Space picks what is captured (a dragged region or a whole window), Tab picks what you get (an image or just its text). E.g. Window mode + Text capture OCRs one whole window without saving an image at all.

  4. Image capture (the default): saved immediately as an element (image

    • timestamp) so it shows up right away, then OCR runs in the background and attaches its text a moment later.

  5. Text capture: OCR runs immediately, the recognized text is copied to the clipboard and saved as a text element. No image file is written to disk in this mode. If no text is recognized, Gisti beeps and the clipboard is left untouched.

Window mode

Space switches the overlay to Window mode – the window under the cursor is highlighted, one click captures it. The window is captured as an object, not cut out of the screen:

  • Rounded corners stay transparent in the saved PNG – no desktop pixels baked in, so the shot pastes cleanly onto any background.
  • The window is captured whole, even when it’s partially covered by other windows.
  • The menu bar (or a single status-bar icon) can be clicked and captured the same way.

If there’s nothing capturable under the cursor, the click just beeps.

OCR

  • Runs locally via Apple’s Vision framework – no cloud, no upload.
  • Recognized text is indexed for search – find a screenshot by a word that was on the screen (and semantically, see Semantic search).
  • Copy OCR Text (⌘ R) extracts it as plain text.
  • OCR always runs on capture, for both Image and Text mode – there’s no setting to turn it off.

After capture

  • Open the element to view, crop, rotate, or pick colors.
  • ⌘ Y summarizes what the screenshot says.
  • Settings → Screenshots → Open after capture opens the panel and jumps straight to the screenshot viewer right after you take a screenshot, instead of just leaving it in the stream (on by default).
  • Settings → Screenshots also sets the hotkey and the image storage limit (shared by screenshots and images copied to the clipboard).