Editing and Redaction

Editing & Redaction

After a recording you can fix it without re-recording — blur out something sensitive, reword a step, or delete/reorder steps. Everything stays local: no upload, no download, nothing leaves your machine.

Open the editor

From the tray menu choose “Edit last session”, or from a terminal:

stepshot edit ~/Pictures/stepshot/session-<timestamp>

This starts a tiny local server (on 127.0.0.1, protected by a one-time token) and opens the editor in your browser. Leave the terminal / tray running while you edit; press Ctrl+C or click “Done” to stop it.

What you can do

• Redact an area — drag a rectangle across a screenshot. Click a box to remove it again. Redaction is destructive: the original pixels in the saved step-NNN.png are replaced with a mosaic and cannot be recovered.
• Redact the clicked element — one click on “Redact clicked element” blanks exactly the button/field that was clicked (its box is detected via accessibility at capture time). Great for a highlighted username or token.
• Edit the description — type over a step’s text. Clearing it back to the original reverts to the auto-generated description.
• Delete a step — click Delete; the step greys out and is dropped on apply (remaining steps renumber, gap-free).
• Reorder steps — the ▲ / ▼ buttons.
• Insert a manual step — ＋ Add step adds a new step you write yourself (required text, optional image file). Handy for a note or a preparatory step the recorder couldn’t capture. Without an image it renders text-only.

Applying

Click Apply changes. The edits are written straight back into the session, session.json and every enabled export (HTML/Markdown/PDF/DOCX) are regenerated, and the editor reloads onto the updated result. There is no edits.json to download and no extra command to run.

Scripting (headless)

The editor is a friendly front-end for the same engine you can drive directly:

# apply an edits.json (as the editor would POST it), or with none, just
# regenerate every enabled export from session.json:
stepshot apply <session-dir> [edits.json]

edits.json is one ordered list of entries — position sets the order, omitting an original deletes it:

{
  "steps": [
    { "ref": 2, "redact": [[x, y, w, h]] },
    { "ref": 1, "description": "Custom text" },
    { "ref": 3, "description": null }
  ]
}

ref is the original step index in session.json; redact boxes are in image-pixel coordinates; description sets an override, null reverts to the auto text, and an absent key leaves it unchanged.

The source of truth

Each session folder holds a session.json — every step’s metadata plus the clicked element’s box. Both the editor and stepshot apply rebuild all formats from it, so your exports always match the edited session.