Show HN: Grip – Open-Source Screen Studio Alternative for Mac

Free and open source macOS app Professional recordings and screenshots within seconds.

Press your keys and talk. Grip zooms where you click, glides your cursor, and captions your voice. The link works before the upload finishes.

Download for macOS Read the docs

macOS 15 or later on Apple silicon No account No watermark

Exported by Grip from a raw 6-second take. The zoom, the gliding cursor, and the click swell are automatic.

01 / 13 From people who switched

Show, don’t tell. In their own words.

People come to Grip from recorders that felt slow and editors that ate the afternoon. This is what they say a week later.

I switched from my old recorder and never looked back. Recording used to feel like paperwork. Now it’s one keystroke.

It’s so snappy. I press the shortcut, talk, stop, and the link works before the upload is even done.

People reply to my videos asking how I made them. Honestly, Grip did.

If your engineers are shy about sharing updates, try giving them Grip.

I switched from my old recorder and never looked back. Recording used to feel like paperwork. Now it’s one keystroke.

It’s so snappy. I press the shortcut, talk, stop, and the link works before the upload is even done.

People reply to my videos asking how I made them. Honestly, Grip did.

If your engineers are shy about sharing updates, try giving them Grip.

Raw recordings are hard to watch: a tiny cursor on a huge screen, nothing in focus, and a lot of “um”. Grip polishes the take for you, and keeps every edit a choice you can change.

The screen freezes under Grip’s overlay with your last area selected. Mark it up and copy it, or press Return to record.

Camera, mic, and system audio record on one clock. Grip stays out of the shot and warns you when your mic goes silent.

A small card offers an MP4 under 20 MB, a GIF under 10 MB, or a link that works before the upload finishes.

Press your keys, even macOS’s screenshot ones, and the screen freezes in the mode you used last. Draw arrows, boxes, ink, and text on top, pixelate what’s private, then copy it, save it, or record it.

Five markup tools, one key each

Area, display, window, or iPhone

04 / 13 Speed

8ms From shortcut to ready

Press your shortcut and the screen freezes, ready to record. Grip naps in your menu bar, so there is never anything to wait for.

Even the quickest blink takes about 100 milliseconds. Grip is ready twelve times over.

At rest, your heart beats about once every 0.8 seconds. Grip could open a hundred times in between.

Its wings flap about 50 times a second. Grip is ready before one flap is done.

Clicks and typing become zooms that follow your cursor, and a glass loupe magnifies one spot while the rest stays in view. The cursor is redrawn smooth, passing exactly through every click.

Each zoom is an edit you can move

Keystrokes as keycaps in your layout

06 / 13 Captions and voice

Captions written on your Mac.

Grip transcribes your voice on your Mac and times every word. It cuts background noise, softens harsh S sounds, keeps quiet phrases audible, and makes sure nothing clips, so you sound produced.

25 European languages

As loud as online video

07 / 13 Editor

Edit a video like a doc.

Select words in the transcript and press Delete, and the video follows. Grip finds filler words and long pauses and removes them in one click. The rest is a keyboard-first timeline.

C cuts, X ripple-deletes, Z zooms

Speed from 0.25× to 8×, pitch kept

08 / 13 Make it yours

Frame it after the take.

Pick a wallpaper, a device frame, and a camera style once the recording is done. Save the whole look as a preset, and every new take can wear it.

185 wallpapers, drawn live on the GPU

MacBook, iPhone, and iPad frames

09 / 13 Export and share

One take, every format. Nothing falls out of frame.

MP4 up to 4K, a GIF that fits a README, or subtitles aligned through every cut. Narrow formats follow the cursor, and share links take comments at the exact second.

10 / 13 Under the hood

The usual recorder bugs. Designed out.

Each one shipped in a real screen recorder. Grip designs them out from the first commit instead of patching them later.

Captions, zooms, keystrokes, and audio stay in sync through every cut and speed change.

Every zoom, caption, and keystroke stays on its moment, however you cut around it.

Grip records the screen without the cursor and draws it back in, so you can smooth, resize, or hide it later.

One renderer draws both, so the export matches the preview frame for frame.

Grip writes the take to disk as it records and rebuilds an interrupted one at the next launch.

Grip won’t start with under 1 GB free, warns when space runs low, and keeps what it wrote.

Names like “Demo #1 ✨ café” are in the test suite and the demo project.

The timeline is checked against a 2-hour project with 500 cuts, 300 zooms, and 20,000 caption words.

Star on GitHub Read the rules

01 Open source

Every line is on GitHub under AGPL-3.0, so anyone can read it, build it, or keep it going.

Recording, editing, transcription, and background removal stay on it. No telemetry, and crash reports stay on your disk.

Only sharing a link signs in to bestboy.dev, once. Viewers, teammates, and comments never cost anything.

Yes. Grip is free and open source under AGPL-3.0, with no subscription, no account, and no watermark.

macOS 15 or later on Apple silicon. Captions download a speech model of about 670 MB the first time you use them.

Nowhere, unless you share them. Grip goes online only to download the speech model once, to check for updates, and to upload what you share.

Always. Grip keeps your screen, camera, mic, and every click and keystroke on separate tracks. Every zoom, cut, and caption is an edit you can undo, and the raw recording never changes.

You keep the take. Grip writes tracks in fragments and rebuilds an interrupted recording at the next launch.

25 European languages, transcribed on your Mac by NVIDIA Parakeet v3, with timing for every word.

Yes. grip:// links start and stop a recording and open projects, so Raycast, Shortcuts, or a shell script can drive Grip.

Grip updates itself. Updates download in the background and install while you’re away, never during a recording or an export.

Download Grip, press your shortcut, and have a link to share before the moment passes.

Download for macOS Read the docs

Free and open source AGPL-3.0