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The preview editor

Every capture lands here, unless you used one of the "no editor" shortcuts. It is where you mark a screenshot up, cut a recording down, and decide where the result goes.

Your capture is already on your clipboard. The moment the editor opens, the capture is copied for you. If all you wanted was to paste it somewhere, you can do that immediately and close the editor.

A window or a whole screen

The editor comes in two shapes, and you can swap between them at any time with the button in its header. Its tooltip reads "Fullscreen overlay" or "Windowed", depending on which one you would get.

  • Windowed is a normal window you can move, resize, and put beside the thing you are writing about. This is the default.
  • Overlay fills the screen, the way the capture overlay does.

Which one you get for the next capture is a setting, under Preview Editor. On Windows 10 only the window is available.

You can have several editors open at once. The one you last clicked owns the keyboard.

What is on screen

  • The top bar holds the tools, grouped and captioned: Canvas, Shape, Redact, Box Highlight, Text and Draw. Those captions can be turned off in settings.
  • The bottom bar holds colour, line width, the covermark, and the zoom control.
  • Save, Copy, Share and Upload sit in the header, along with Undo, Redo, Settings and Close.

A recording gets a timeline instead of the annotation tools. There are no annotation tools for video.

Buttons that carry your edits out of the editor tint themselves while you have unsaved changes, so you can see at a glance that something is waiting.

Zoom and pan

Zoom and pan apply to images. The video editor has no zoom.

Control What it does
Ctrl + scroll wheel Zooms towards your pointer
Scroll wheel Pans up and down, and sideways
Shift + scroll wheel Pans sideways
Middle-mouse drag Pans, whatever tool you have armed
Alt + left drag Pans
The Hand tool, then drag Pans
Pinch on a trackpad Zooms, on macOS

Scrollbars appear when the picture is bigger than the space for it, and they work normally.

The zoom control at the bottom is a dropdown plus a slider. The dropdown offers Fit, 100%, 125%, 150%, 200%, 300%, 400% and 500%. It is also the readout: at any other zoom it shows the exact percentage. The slider has a magnetic notch at 100 percent so you can land on it exactly.

Fit shows the whole picture and never blows it up bigger than life. It is the reset. Zoom runs from 50 percent to 500 percent, and the list quietly drops any preset your graphics hardware cannot actually draw.

One thing that surprises people: 100% means the size the picture was captured at, not physical pixels on your screen. On a high-resolution display, a capture is taken at that display's real density, so true 1:1 is the 200 percent preset.

Undo covers everything

There is one undo history, and everything goes into it in the order you did it: annotations, crops, covermark choices and their sliders, the spotlight dim, timeline cuts and segment deletions.

That means undo always walks backwards through your actual session. You never have to work out which undo stack you are in.

Keys What it does
Ctrl+Z, or Cmd+Z Undo
Ctrl+Shift+Z, or Cmd+Shift+Z Redo

There are Undo and Redo buttons in the header too. They grey out when there is nothing left to undo.

While you are typing inside a text annotation, those same keys step through that text box's own history instead, which is what you would expect from any text field.

Keyboard shortcuts

Every one of these can be changed in Settings, under Keyboard Shortcuts, where you will also find the full list. The primary key is Ctrl on Linux and Windows, and Cmd on macOS.

Doing something with the capture

Keys Action
primary + S Save
primary + C Copy to clipboard
primary + U Upload
Esc Close
primary + Z Undo
primary + Shift + Z Redo
W Covermark picker

Tools

Key Tool
C Crop
V Select
H Hand
A Arrow
I Step marker
M Redaction tools: pixelate, then blur
U Shape tools: highlight, border, border highlight, spotlight
T Text
B Freehand
E Eraser
S Colour picker
X Swap to the companion colour
L Next line width
D Duplicate what is selected
primary + A Select every annotation
primary + D Deselect
Delete or Backspace Delete what is selected

Video

Key Action
P Play or pause
, Previous frame
. Next frame
Delete Delete the selected segment

Esc happens in stages. The first press ends whatever you are in the middle of: a text edit, or a selection. Only a press with nothing left to give up reaches the editor and closes it. You cannot lose your work to a stray Esc.

Messages and waiting

Short messages appear as small notices, for about four seconds. They shorten themselves as soon as you get back to work, they stack no more than three deep, and repeating the same one refreshes it rather than piling up copies.

When the app is working on your export it dims the editor, shows a spinner, and says what it is doing, with lines like "Baking in your edits" or "Rendering the final cut". It ignores clicks while it works. The same thing happens with a different set of lines while a fresh capture is being opened.

Where to go next