Live annotation

Draw on your screen while a recording is running, and the drawing is in the video. It is for pointing at things: circling the button you are talking about, underlining a line of output, scribbling an arrow at the thing that just went wrong.

Nothing about it is added afterwards. What you draw is in the file, at the moment you drew it.

The tools

They live in two places, and both offer the same four controls: the recording toolbar, and the tray icon's Live Annotations menu. The tray is the one to use when the toolbar has hidden itself, and it is the only one on a desktop where the toolbar cannot be shown at all. In the two cases further down where choosing a tool presents a window of ours, that window carries the same four controls again, so they are always within reach of what you are drawing on.

Control	What it does
Pointer	The normal recording state. Nothing draws
Marker	Ink that stays until you clear it
Magic Marker	Ink that clears itself
Clear Marks	Clears both kinds at once, right now

Pointer, Marker and Magic Marker are one selector, so exactly one of them is chosen at any moment and pressing the one already chosen does nothing. Clear Marks is not a fourth tool. It is something you do once, so it does not stay selected.

On Linux, you can also switch tools from the command line while a recording is running:

cosmic-capture-kit record --tool pointer|marker|magic-marker|erase

erase is Clear Marks. Point a shortcut in your own desktop settings at each one and you get the tools without reaching for the toolbar, which is worth doing if you annotate often. See the command line for the rest of the controls that work this way, and for why they are Linux only.

Magic Marker

Magic Marker ink dissolves on its own, and the timer is measured from the last thing you drew rather than from each mark's own age. So it holds while you are still drawing. Keep annotating and nothing moves; stop for two seconds and the whole drawing lifts over the next second, gone three seconds after you stopped.

It lifts in the order you drew it, oldest first, sweeping forward through the ink. An arrow disappears from its tail toward its head rather than the whole line going at once.

That is the difference between the two tools. Marker is for something you want on screen for a while. Magic Marker is for pointing at something in passing, without having to reach for Clear Marks afterwards.

Putting the tools away

Three things put the tools back on Pointer, and they all do exactly the same thing:

Keys
Esc
V	The key the editor uses for its own Pointer tool
Right click	Anywhere on the recording

Use whichever is nearest. None of them can stop, save or cancel the recording. Stopping stays on the toolbar's stop button and in the tray menu, which is deliberate: while you are drawing, the screen is a mode, and the key you hit to leave a mode should never be the key that ends your take.

They do nothing while Pointer is already chosen, so there is no harm in pressing one to be sure.

What it looks like

Ink is drawn in a thin line, the same weight the preview editor calls Thin line, and in the same colour the editor's annotation tools use. There is no colour or width control while a recording is running.

While a drawing tool is chosen your pointer becomes a crosshair, which is how you can tell at a glance that the screen has become a drawing.

Your pointer stays in the recording

While a tool is chosen, the pointer keeps appearing in the video, drawn as the same crosshair you see on screen. You do not lose your cursor for the part of the recording where you are pointing at things, which is the part where a viewer most needs to see where you are pointing.

If you have turned Preserve mouse cursor off in Settings, under Capture Modes, no pointer is drawn. A recording you asked to have no cursor in does not gain one here.

Pausing other media while you draw

Pause other media during live annotation in Settings, under Audio & Video pauses your music and video players while a drawing tool is chosen, and starts them again when you go back to Pointer.

It is off by default, and it is a separate switch from the preview editor's version of the same idea. This one changes what the recording contains, because the pause is audible in the recorded system audio, and annotating over a video that is meant to be playing is a real thing to want.

Three ways it can behave

Which one you get depends on your desktop and on what you are recording. The app decides once, when the recording starts, and tells you on screen when it is the third.

Drawing on the screen

The usual case, and what you get on macOS, on Windows, and on COSMIC.

The drawing has a surface of its own that sits over everything, so you can draw and use the recording controls at the same time. Marks stay on screen after you go back to Pointer, until Clear Marks takes them or a Magic Marker dissolve does.

Drawing on the screen, one thing at a time

What you get on a desktop with no layer shell, which today means a GNOME session or a Flatpak build, when you are recording a region or a whole monitor.

There is no way to put a see-through surface over everything, so choosing a drawing tool presents one full-screen window instead. You are still drawing on the live screen and the recording still gets it, but that window has the keyboard and the pointer, so it is draw or use the controls rather than both. Going back to Pointer takes the window away, and the marks lift with it.

Drawing on a frozen picture

What you get when the recording is of a single window and the desktop will not say where that window is on screen.

Choosing a drawing tool shows the last frame the recording captured, held still inside a window of ours, and you draw on that. The window carries a caption saying what is happening:

Drawing on a frozen frame of the recorded window, which keeps recording live underneath.

Or, when the reason is that the desktop would not locate the window:

Drawing on a frozen frame: this desktop will not say where the recorded window is, so the marks are placed on the picture instead of on the screen.

The caption is the honest caveat. The window you are recording carries on recording live the whole time, so what you are drawing on is a moment that has already passed. Your marks land on the picture at the position you put them, which is what you want for circling a button that has not moved, and is wrong if the thing you are pointing at has scrolled away. Going back to Pointer dismisses the frozen picture.

Where each one applies

Your setup	Region	Monitor	Window
macOS 13 and newer	On screen	On screen	On screen
Windows 10 and 11	On screen	On screen	On screen
COSMIC	On screen	On screen	On screen
KDE, Sway, Hyprland, niri and the rest	On screen	On screen	Frozen picture
GNOME sessions, and Flatpak builds	One at a time	One at a time	Frozen picture
X11 sessions	Not yet	Not yet	Not yet

Two limits are worth stating plainly rather than dressing up.

A window recording on a desktop other than COSMIC uses the frozen picture. Recording one window streams that window's own pixels, so your drawing has to be placed into them, and placing it needs to know where the window is. Only COSMIC's compositor will tell an app that. The desktop portal names a video stream and never a window, and plain Wayland tells an app nothing about where anything is.

One exception to the COSMIC row above. When a COSMIC recording does go through the desktop portal, and two of your windows are exactly the same size, the app can fail to tell which one you picked. It falls back to the frozen picture and says so in the caption rather than putting your marks in the wrong place.

GNOME cannot host the drawing surface at all. Mutter does not implement wlr-layer-shell, which is the thing that lets an app put a surface over the whole screen, so there is nowhere to put a see-through drawing layer. The full-screen window described above is the workaround, not a preference.