What is cap?

An open-source native macOS capture and bookmarking app.

cap is an open-source, native macOS capture and bookmarking app. Press a hotkey on anything worth keeping — a page, a paragraph, an image — and find it again later with full-text search.

• Capture with one keystroke. ⌃⌥C saves whatever is in front of you: the page in your browser, the text you have selected, or an image on the clipboard. A toast confirms the capture; click it to attach a note.
• Recall instantly. ⌥⇧Space opens a Spotlight-style search window over everything you have saved — including the readable body of captured pages and text recognized inside images.
• Local-first. Everything lives in a single SQLite database under ~/Library/Application Support/cap/. No account, no sync service, no telemetry.
• Scriptable. The cap CLI captures, searches, and exports from the terminal, with stable --json output and documented exit codes.

How it works

cap is a menu-bar app (no Dock icon) with two companions that install alongside it:

• the cap CLI, symlinked onto your PATH by the Homebrew cask
• cap-agent, a background worker managed by launchd that enriches captures — fetching page bodies and running OCR — even when the app is not running

Link captures store more than the URL: cap extracts the readable article body so search can match the words on the page, not just its title.

Start here

• Install — Homebrew or direct download, and what first-run setup asks for
• Capturing — what the hotkey saves from each app, and why
• Search — the search window and the site: / date filter syntax
• CLI — capture and search from the terminal
• Privacy — exactly what touches the network (two things, both optional)