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Recording a screen
The global hotkey (⌥⌘5 by default) starts and stops recording. The menu-bar item does the same. Both are the fast path, and neither opens a window: you press the key, choose what to capture, and the app gets out of the way. The editor appears when you stop.
You can change both hotkeys in Settings ▸ Keyboard Shortcuts.
When you start a recording, macOS's own window picker appears and you choose what is captured. Every recording, with no way to turn it off.
That is deliberate, and there are two reasons:
- Choosing the target is the moment you decide what to share. Reusing your last choice silently is exactly when you record the window you forgot was behind the one you meant.
- It is the system picker, not one Snitt drew. An app that enumerates windows itself gets charged a recurring re-consent prompt by macOS, roughly monthly. Going through the system picker avoids that, so you grant Screen Recording once instead of being asked again and again.
The menu-bar item shows the recording state for the whole session, and clicking it stops the recording. That indicator is not decoration: nothing records without it showing.
Markers. Press the marker hotkey (⌥⌘M by default) at any point to drop a marker. Markers become chapters in an exported video and rows in the editor's panel, and they are the fastest way to find the moment that mattered in a long recording. Add a label later.
Pause and resume from the menu-bar item. A paused recording keeps one continuous document rather than producing several files to stitch together.
Both of these are off until you turn them on, in Settings ▸ What gets recorded:
- Record microphone captures your voice on a separate track from system audio, so the two can be balanced or muted independently later. Snitt warns you if your speakers are likely to bleed into the microphone.
- Capture events records when you clicked and typed, never what you typed. That timing is what lets the editor find dead air and trim it, and what lets the editor draw click rings. The log stays inside the recording's bundle.
Snitt edits footage it did not record. File ▸ Open takes an .mp4 or
.mov as readily as a .snitt, File ▸ New from Clipboard (⌘N) opens
whatever video you last copied — greyed out when there is none — and you can
drop a video on Snitt's Dock icon or open it with Snitt from the Finder.
File ▸ New (⇧⌘N) opens an empty document you can drop a video onto.
The file is copied into a new recording, so the original is left exactly where it is and nothing is re-encoded. After that there is no difference between it and something Snitt recorded: auto-trim, cutting, markers, transcription and voiceover all work the same, because they all work on the recording inside the document.
An opened video lives in a temporary folder until you save it. ⌘S asks where it belongs, once. After that it saves continuously like any other recording, and ⌘S has nothing left to do.
Dropping a video onto an editor that already has one does nothing yet. A
.snitt holds a single recording, and every marker, cut and caption is a
position in it — splicing a second video in needs the document to hold a
sequence of clips instead, which is a change to the format rather than a
setting.
~/Documents/Snitt by default, changeable in Settings ▸ Recordings folder.
Each recording is a .snitt bundle rather than a plain video file. See
The .snitt document for what is inside one and why it is
shaped that way.