TL;DR
I kept Lark alive on my Mac just for Cmd+Shift+A screenshots. macshot does everything Lark’s screenshot did - and more - at a fraction of the resource cost.
The Problem
Let me be real - Lark is the best all-in-one workspace software I’ve ever used. After leaving ByteDance, nothing in the market has come close. Chat, docs, calendar, video calls, project management - everything just works together seamlessly. I haven’t found anything that beats it, and maybe I just haven’t looked hard enough, but that’s how good it is.
So even after I stopped needing it for work, I kept it installed. The reason? The screenshot tool.
Cmd+Shift+A → select region → annotate with arrows, nice text, blur → copy. Clean UI, smooth flow. And OCR - select any text on screen, extract it instantly. That combo was so good it single-handedly justified keeping the entire app alive.
But here’s the thing about all-in-one apps - they’re all-in-one on your RAM too.
Lark was quietly eating hundreds of megabytes just sitting in the background. Multiple processes, always running, always consuming. For a screenshot tool I used maybe 10 times a day. That’s an expensive screenshot button.
The Discovery
macshot - a free, open-source screenshot tool built with native Swift and AppKit. No Electron. No subscription. No bloat.
~8 MB memory at idle.
1brew install sw33tlie/macshot/macshot
One command. Done.
What Sold Me
After 3 days of using it:
- The UI looks premium. Honestly, better than Lark’s. I didn’t expect that from a free open-source tool.
- It’s quick. Like, really quick. Lark had a noticeable delay every time I triggered a capture - macshot just snaps.
- Native feel. After you capture, a little preview pops up at the bottom right - just like macOS’s built-in screenshot. Small thing, but it feels right. I also remapped the hotkey to
Cmd+Shift+Aso my muscle memory didn’t have to change - almost all shortcuts are customisable. - OCR works. That was the must-have feature for me, and it delivers. Plus there’s a bunch of post-capture features I haven’t even explored yet - scroll capture, screen recording, beautify, the list goes on.
It doesn’t just match Lark’s screenshot tool. It looks and feels more polished.
Glad I took the time to actually set it up and try it properly instead of just bookmarking it for “later”.
The Uninstall
So I finally did it - dragged Lark to the trash.
The moment I quit Lark and watched my memory usage drop was genuinely satisfying. All those background processes, gone. And I lost nothing I actually used.
If you’re keeping an app alive for one feature - go find the replacement. It’s probably out there, and it’s probably lighter than you think.
Install: brew install sw33tlie/macshot/macshot
Repo: github.com/sw33tLie/macshot