AIShot

One hotkey: screenshot → straight into the AI app you're talking to.
No Finder digging · no drag & drop · quick destinations in the menu bar

한국어

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Press a hotkey → drag a region (or hit Space for a window, Esc to cancel) → the PNG is saved into your usual screenshot folder and handed to the destination you chose from the menu bar or Settings:

Destination setting	Where every capture goes	What gets pasted
A specific app — Claude, Antigravity, ChatGPT, Codex, or any other app	that app, regardless of what was frontmost; AIShot opens it when needed by default	configurable: Automatic, PNG image, or File path
A terminal — Ghostty, iTerm2, Terminal, WezTerm, kitty, Warp	the CLI agent you keep open there — Claude Code, Codex CLI, Gemini CLI — in whichever window, tab and split the terminal itself last had focused	escaped file path + auto ⌘V, optionally followed by Return
Destination Automatic + a frontmost terminal or IDE — Ghostty, Terminal, iTerm2, kitty, WezTerm, Warp, VS Code, Antigravity, Cursor	the frontmost app	with Paste as Automatic: escaped file path + auto ⌘V
Destination Automatic + a frontmost AI app or browser — Claude, Codex, ChatGPT, Gemini, Safari, Chrome	the frontmost app	with Paste as Automatic: the PNG itself + auto ⌘V
Destination Automatic + anything else	clipboard only; no ⌘V is sent	with Paste as Automatic: the PNG itself, ready to paste manually

Every capture is also saved as a file with the native macOS naming (Screenshot 2026-07-08 at 11.09.27 AM.png), so pasting and archiving happen in one motion.

No save-location setup needed: AIShot saves to the same folder macOS uses for ⌘⇧3/4/5 screenshots. If you've moved that folder (System Settings / defaults write com.apple.screencapture location), AIShot follows automatically. You only need to configure the save location if you want AIShot captures in a different folder than regular screenshots — run the built-in folder chooser once:

open -nb space.techjuicelab.aishot --args --choose-dir

Full resolution order: --out DIR flag → the app's own folder (set by --choose-dir, or defaults write space.techjuicelab.aishot saveDir ...) → the system screenshot folder → ~/Desktop (the macOS stock default).

AIShot separates control from capture: one lightweight menu bar host stays available for destination changes, while every capture runs in its own short-lived process and exits as soon as the save/paste handoff is complete.

Scrolling capture — a whole window in one image

Press ⌘⇧6 and the screen dims with the window under the cursor highlighted. Click the one you want (Esc cancels) and AIShot rewinds it to the top, scrolls to the bottom while photographing it, and matches the overlaps into a single tall PNG. The result is saved and routed to your destination exactly like any other capture.

This is not browser-only — anything that scrolls generally works: Safari, Chrome, Firefox, native apps. Because nothing outside a window can read its scroll position, the seam is found by matching pixels, which leaves two limits:

• Horizontally pinned sidebars (Wikipedia's table of contents, say) repeat down the page. The content is complete; the margins carry echoes.
• Playing video or an infinite-scroll feed can stop the capture early when no seam can be justified. Everything up to that point is still exact.

Knowing it finished

The capture opens with the same shutter macOS plays for its own screenshots, and closes with a short chime and a panel near the top of the screen — ✓ Scrolling capture complete — 4 frames · 2560×2027 — that fades after a couple of seconds. A scrolling capture can run for tens of seconds with nothing on screen, and without a signal there is no way to tell a finished one from a stuck one. Failures get a different sound and a window explaining why.

A Notification Center banner is posted too when permission exists. macOS often withholds it from a locally-signed build of AIShot, so the on-screen panel is the signal that actually arrives.

defaults write space.techjuicelab.aishot scrollNotify -bool false   # silence it

Text recognition — off by default

Out of the box this is a screenshot and nothing more: a full-resolution PNG, saved and copied. No recognition runs, because on a long page it costs more time than the capture did.

There is one reason to turn it on, and it is a good one. A stitched page routinely passes 30,000 px tall, and Claude scales image input down to 2576 px on the long edge — send the picture alone and the body text arrives too small to read. If handing long pages to a model is the job, switch Settings → Scroll OCR on and macOS Vision extracts the text to travel with the image: the image carries the layout, the text carries the content. Korean and English together, no network and no API key.

Value	Behavior
off (default)	no recognition; fastest
sidecar	paste the image only; write the text to a .txt beside the PNG
doublePaste	paste the image, swap the clipboard to the text, paste again
textOnly	paste the text only
auto	both while the image stays legible, text alone past 8000 px tall

With recognition on, the text is always written to the .txt as well — the clipboard is transient, the file is not. The PNG is saved at full resolution under every setting; what these change is only what reaches the clipboard.

defaults write space.techjuicelab.aishot scrollOcrMode doublePaste   # default off
defaults write space.techjuicelab.aishot scrollMaxFrames -int 120   # default 60

scrollMaxFrames is the stop that keeps an infinite-scroll page from running forever.

Menu bar

build.sh installs and starts a single menu bar host, then registers it as a per-user LaunchAgent so it comes back after login. Click the viewfinder icon for:

• Capture Screenshot… — starts the same one-shot interactive capture as the hotkey.
• Capture Scrolling Screenshot… — pick a window and capture all of it as one stitched image.
• Destination: current app — quickly switch between Automatic (Frontmost App) and installed presets. The current choice has a checkmark; More Destinations in Settings… opens the full picker.
• Settings… — the normal entry point for choosing any app and configuring paste format, destination auto-open, and focus return.
• Open Screenshot Folder — opens the folder AIShot currently saves into.
• Quit AIShot — stops the menu host for this session. The LaunchAgent starts it again after the next login.

If the menu icon is not running, start the singleton host manually:

open -gnb space.techjuicelab.aishot --args --menubar

Destination app — every shot lands in one place

Open AIShot menu bar → Settings…. Choose a preset such as Claude, Antigravity, ChatGPT, Codex, or Gemini, or pick any installed .app with Choose Other…. Once a destination is set, every capture goes there regardless of which app was frontmost.

CLI agents in a terminal

The destination list has a second section for terminals — Ghostty, iTerm2, Terminal, WezTerm, kitty, Warp. What you are really aiming at there is the agent running inside: Claude Code, Codex CLI and Gemini CLI all read an image from a file path in the prompt, which is exactly what path mode pastes. Pin Ghostty and a shot taken in a browser, Figma or anywhere else switches to Ghostty and drops the path on the agent's prompt line.

A CLI agent has no bundle ID of its own, so the terminal is the address. AIShot does not pick the window, tab or split — activating the terminal restores the surface you last worked in, and the paste lands there. With several agents open at once, switch to the one you want first, or leave the destination on Automatic and capture with that terminal in front.

By default the path is left on the prompt line with the cursor after it, so you can type your question and send both together. To hand the shot over immediately instead, turn on Press Return after pasting a path into a terminal in Settings. It applies only to terminals in path mode — in an editor like VS Code a Return would just be a newline in the file.

The same panel lets you choose:

• Paste as: Automatic picks a file path for known terminal/IDE apps and a PNG for other destinations; choose PNG image or File path to force that format, including while the destination is Automatic.
• Open the destination app when it is not running: on by default. AIShot launches the configured app, brings it forward, and pastes. If the app cannot be opened or activated, no ⌘V is sent and the capture remains on the clipboard (the PNG file is still saved).
• Return to the previous app after pasting: off by default, so focus stays in the destination and you can immediately type your prompt.
• Automatic (frontmost app) as the destination: keeps the original routing behavior. With Paste as Automatic, known terminals/IDEs receive a path, known AI apps/browsers receive the PNG, and unsupported apps get clipboard-only.

Advanced: CLI and defaults

The menu bar is the normal way to configure AIShot. For scripts or dotfiles, the settings panel and the same values remain available from the CLI:

# open the same settings panel without the menu
open -nb space.techjuicelab.aishot --args --settings

# select a destination
defaults write space.techjuicelab.aishot targetApp claude

# auto | image | path
defaults write space.techjuicelab.aishot targetPasteMode image

# optional: do not open a stopped destination; return after pasting
defaults write space.techjuicelab.aishot autoLaunchTarget -bool false
defaults write space.techjuicelab.aishot returnFocus -bool true

# optional: press Return after pasting a path into a terminal, so the CLI
# agent receives the shot without a second keystroke
defaults write space.techjuicelab.aishot pasteSubmit -bool true

# restore Automatic destination routing
defaults delete space.techjuicelab.aishot targetApp

Destination aliases: claude · codex · chatgpt · gemini · antigravity · antigravity-ide · cursor · vscode · safari · chrome · ghostty · iterm · terminal · wezterm · kitty · warp. Any other app can be selected in the picker or specified by bundle ID (osascript -e 'id of app "SomeApp"').

You can also bind a hotkey that sends that run to one specific app regardless of focus. --target beats the stored destination for that run:

open -gnb space.techjuicelab.aishot --args --target codex

Preview what your current setup would do with --self-test.

Install

Requires macOS 14 or later (Apple Silicon or Intel).

Download — no toolchain, nothing to build:

1. Get AIShot.dmg from the latest release.
2. Drag AIShot.app into /Applications.
3. Open it once. AIShot installs its own menu bar LaunchAgent, confirms that it did, and the icon appears in the menu bar — there and after every login.

The app is not notarized, so a browser download arrives quarantined and the first launch is refused. Approve it under System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway (on macOS 15 and later, right-click → Open no longer bypasses this), or clear the flag before launching:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/AIShot.app

Build from source (requires Xcode Command Line Tools):

git clone https://github.com/techjuicelab/aishot.git
cd aishot && ./build.sh   # builds, signs, installs, and starts the menu bar host

Both routes end in the same state, because they run the same installer: build.sh compiles and signs the bundle and then calls AIShot --install, which is exactly what a copy dragged out of the DMG runs on its own first launch. That installer keeps a single registered copy in /Applications, writes ~/Library/LaunchAgents/space.techjuicelab.aishot.menubar.plist, and starts the menu host immediately; captures remain separate one-shot processes. /Applications is group-writable for admin users, so no sudo is involved. On a managed Mac where it is locked down the installer falls back to ~/Applications, and the location can be set explicitly with AISHOT_INSTALL_DIR=~/Applications. Either way a copy left at the other location is removed — two bundles sharing a bundle ID make open -a, the TCC identity and the menu bar item resolve ambiguously.

A copy started from anywhere else — the mounted DMG itself, ~/Downloads — moves itself into the install directory before doing anything else. A LaunchAgent may only point at a bundle that will still be there once the volume is ejected.

Upgrading from an earlier install: the bundle ID changed from com.techjuicelab.aishot to space.techjuicelab.aishot. macOS can wedge a bundle ID so its status item is created but never placed in the menu bar, and that state survives reboots and LaunchServices re-registration. Saved settings migrate to the new domain on first launch and the installer retires the old LaunchAgent, but macOS sees a new app — Screen Recording and Accessibility have to be granted once more.

Automatic updates

From 1.4 AIShot updates itself through Sparkle. The menu bar host checks once a day and offers the update when there is one; to check on demand, use Check for Updates… in the menu bar.

A download is installed only after its EdDSA signature verifies, so a compromised distribution path cannot get arbitrary code installed. The public key used for that check ships inside the app bundle.

If you had been building from source, the first automatic update switches the signing identity from your local ad-hoc signature to the distribution certificate. macOS ties permissions to that identity, so you will have to grant Screen Recording and Accessibility once more. The certificate is stable afterwards, so later updates will not ask again.

To opt out:

defaults write space.techjuicelab.aishot SUEnableAutomaticChecks -bool false

Hotkey

Bind any launcher you already use to:

open -gnb space.techjuicelab.aishot --args --capture

No arguments still means the same one-shot capture, so existing launcher and Karabiner rules continue to work unchanged.

• Karabiner-Elements:

  mkdir -p ~/.config/karabiner/assets/complex_modifications
  cp karabiner/aishot.json ~/.config/karabiner/assets/complex_modifications/

  then enable the "AIShot" rule in Karabiner-Elements → Complex Modifications → Add predefined rule. Ships as ⌘⇧2 for a region and ⌘⇧6 for a scrolling capture — right next to the system's ⌘⇧3/4/5 screenshot family. A both-⇧-keys-at-once rule (Codex-style) is included too — enable it as well if you like.

  ⌘⇧6 is the slot macOS reserves for capturing the Touch Bar, but Karabiner intercepts below the system hotkey layer so the two never meet. If you move the binding to Raycast, Alfred or Shortcuts.app, turn the Touch Bar entry off under System Settings → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts → Screenshots.

• Alfred / Raycast / Shortcuts.app: point a hotkey at the same open command.

First-run permissions (one-time)

1. First hotkey press → Screen Recording prompt appears and the app exits (System Settings → Privacy & Security → Screen & System Audio Recording → allow AIShot).
2. Press again → capture UI appears. On save, a Files and Folders prompt may appear for your screenshot folder (iCloud Drive / Desktop) — allow it, or nothing can be saved.
3. After the first completed capture → Accessibility prompt (for the synthesized ⌘V). Until granted, AIShot still copies to the clipboard; once granted, pasting is automatic from the next shot on.

Signing and permission persistence: build.sh automatically uses a valid Keychain code-signing identity named TechJuice Local Code Signing when one is available. Its stable designated requirement lets Screen Recording and Accessibility grants survive later rebuilds; no script edit is needed.

Without that certificate, the build falls back to ad-hoc signing and an update may require permission approval again. The installer compares the new and previously installed designated requirements: it preserves TCC grants when they match, and runs tccutil reset All space.techjuicelab.aishot only when the signing identity changed so the next capture re-prompts cleanly.

Flags

open -gnb space.techjuicelab.aishot --args --mode image

Flag	Description	Default
--capture	run one interactive capture and exit (explicit alias for no arguments)	no-argument behavior
--scroll	pick a window and capture it top to bottom as one image	—
--window ID	scroll-capture this window, skipping the picker (for scripts)	—
--list-windows	print the window IDs --window accepts	—
--scroll-debug DIR	write every raw frame to DIR and trace the run	—
--menubar	run the singleton resident menu host until Quit AIShot	installed LaunchAgent uses this
--mode auto|path|image	force the paste format instead of auto-detecting	auto
--target alias|bundle-id	send this run's shot to that app unconditionally (beats the stored destination)	—
--out DIR	destination folder (this run only)	see save-location order above
--choose-dir	open a folder picker and save the choice as the app's default	—
--settings	open the destination, paste-format, auto-launch, and focus settings	—
--no-paste	copy to clipboard only, never synthesize ⌘V	—
--timeout SEC	how long the selection UI may wait	300
--self-test	print folder / frontmost app / permission state and exit	—
--install	wire this copy up — install it, register the LaunchAgent, start the host — and exit	what build.sh and install scripts call

Customize

Add apps to these categories without rebuilding — AIShot reads three defaults arrays at launch:

# find an app's bundle ID
osascript -e 'id of app "SomeTerm"'

defaults write space.techjuicelab.aishot extraPathApps  -array-add "com.example.someterm"
defaults write space.techjuicelab.aishot extraImageApps -array-add "com.example.chatapp"

# a terminal AIShot does not know, so that pasteSubmit's Return applies to it
defaults write space.techjuicelab.aishot extraTerminalApps -array-add "com.example.someterm"

Or edit pathPasteIDs / imagePasteIDs at the top of main.swift and re-run ./build.sh.

Uninstall

launchctl bootout "gui/$UID/space.techjuicelab.aishot.menubar" 2>/dev/null || true
rm -f ~/Library/LaunchAgents/space.techjuicelab.aishot.menubar.plist
rm -rf /Applications/AIShot.app
tccutil reset All space.techjuicelab.aishot
defaults delete space.techjuicelab.aishot 2>/dev/null
# and remove the hotkey rule from your launcher / Karabiner

Log: /tmp/aishot.log

License

MIT © TechJuiceLab