Kap

Recording part of a macOS screen with Kap starts and ends in the menu bar. The recorder is open source and built with web technology, and it removes the ceremony of opening an application, arranging its window and hunting for an export button before anything gets captured.

Clicking the menu bar icon brings up the recorder. You select the portion of the screen to capture, press record, then click the icon again to stop. Holding Option while clicking pauses a recording in progress, and a right click opens further options mid-capture.

A few practical details shape how the project is used day to day.

• Installation: downloads for Apple silicon and for Intel machines, or a single Homebrew cask command.
• Plugins: a documented plugin system, with a guide for anyone writing their own.
• Development builds: the main branch and any other branch can be downloaded directly, though those builds are unsupported and may misbehave.
• Contribution guide: a dedicated document explains how to work on the application itself.
• Related repositories: the website and Aperture are maintained alongside the main project.

Kap is macOS only, with separate builds for the two processor families rather than one universal download. Hosting, builds and error reporting are donated by Vercel, CircleCI and Sentry, and the application is kept going by the contributors listed in the repository.