A friendlier screenshot editor
We've spent the last two weeks reworking Pixelmatic's screenshot editor, and honestly — we're a little giddy about how it's turned out. What started as a handful of "wouldn't it be nice if…" notes became a proper overhaul: inline editing, real keyboard shortcuts, undo/redo, duplication, and a long tail of polish that makes the whole thing feel lighter on its feet. Individually, none of these are headline features. Together, they've transformed the editor from something we tolerated into something we actually enjoy using. Here's the tour.
Paste, edit, download - that's the whole flow
Before we get into specifics, the thing we want people to feel first: there's no ceremony. Hit ⌘V to paste a screenshot straight from your clipboard, annotate it however you like, and hit download. No sign-up, no "save to Pixelmatic," no round-trip through a cloud library. The editor is a tool you reach for, use, and close - like a local app that happens to live in a browser tab.
If you do want to share it with your team, that's a single click away - upload to Pixelmatic and you get a clean share link, same as with videos. But that's an option, never a tollbooth.
Edit text where you see it
Text blocks used to be edited from a sidebar input. Now you just double-click the text on the canvas, type, and click away. The text input itself is invisible until you interact with it - no distracting border around every text block.
We also gave text a proper styling pass: background fill, optional border (with square / medium / large corner radius), size slider, alignment, and bold toggle. Enough to make a clean callout without leaving the canvas.
Undo and redo
There is now an undo/redo toolbar at the top of the editor, next to the "add layer" menu. Both buttons gray out when there's nothing to go back (or forward) to.
Keyboard shortcuts work the way you'd expect:
- ⌘Z / Ctrl+Z - undo
- ⌘⇧Z / Ctrl+Shift+Z - redo
Bursts of changes - dragging a slider, nudging a box around - collapse into a single history entry, so one undo press reverses the whole move instead of unwinding it pixel by pixel.
Alt-drag to duplicate
Hold Alt (or Option on Mac) and drag any layer - box, mask, arrow, text - to drop a copy wherever you let go. The original stays put. It's the Figma move, and it turns out to be the fastest way to make, say, three arrows in a row or a stack of masks for a diff.
Keyboard-first selection
Small things, but they add up:
- Click empty space - deselects the current layer.
- Escape - deselects (and also exits text-edit mode if you're in it).
- Backspace / Delete - removes the selected layer.
If you're typing in a text layer, Backspace does what it always does inside text. The editor is smart enough not to nuke your layer mid-sentence.
Masks with personality
Masks (the blur/color blocks you use to hide sensitive info) now support the same three radius presets as text blocks - square, medium, and large. Large gives you a nice capsule shape for redacting a single row; medium is the sensible default for most boxes.
We also dropped the always-on dashed outline on unselected masks. Masks are visible now (they have fill or blur), so the outline was just visual noise.
Curved arrows that actually look like arrows
Tiny fix, but it bugged us: when you curved an arrow, the rounded end of the shaft poked through the arrowhead, making the tip look recessed. Fixed - the shaft now tucks cleanly under the triangle on both straight and curved arrows.
Sidebar that stops shifting
If you've used the editor recently, you may have noticed the sidebar twitching slightly wider when you selected a text or box layer. The culprit was a crowded row of controls that couldn't shrink past the native <input type="range"> minimum width. Sidebar width is now stable across all layer types.
None of this shows up on a pricing page, but it's the kind of thing you feel every time you use the tool. More polish coming; let us know what else bothers you.
Wouter
Founder