Tendedero: a macOS screenshot line that takes over Cmd+Shift+5

The floating thumbnail is the thing it replaces

macOS takes a screenshot and then parks a small floating thumbnail in the corner of the screen for a few seconds. It is a reasonable design that becomes irritating fast: if you capture a window, the overlay sits on top of whatever you were about to work on, and you are left dragging a small image into an app before the timeout expires.

Tendedero removes that step by relocating screenshots to a line running just under the menu bar. Every capture hangs there immediately, like laundry. The pointer controls visibility: rest it against the menu bar and the line glides down on that screen, move away and the line goes back up. Screenshots never touch the Desktop if you let Tendedero handle them, and only what you drag out of the line is kept.

This is a small idea with a narrow target audience, and it is worth saying who that is. If you take three screenshots an hour, nothing here matters. If you take fifty, the difference between a screenshot you can reach and one you lose to a timeout is the whole value of the app.

One gesture per action, and the list is short on purpose

The interaction table is the product. Click copies the image. Press and hold opens it in Markup, the system editor, and a double click opens it in Preview. Force click, the pressure-sensitive gesture on a trackpad, takes a quick look. Dragging into an app sends a copy while the original stays on the line, and dragging into a folder moves it there and takes it off the line.

Deletion is deliberate rather than hidden. Dragging to the Trash lets it go, and so does clicking the cross drawn on the item. The line itself toggles with Control, Option and T, and the README notes you can rebind that combination under Shortcut in the menu bar.

Screen recordings go through the same line, with a play button over the thumbnail, and press and hold on one opens a trim step.

Inbox: it rewrites Cmd+Shift+5 and restores it on quit

This is the component that decides whether you can trust the app, and it is the one with the sharpest edges. On first launch Tendedero offers to take over your screenshots. If you accept, it turns off the floating thumbnail and saves new screenshots into a folder of its own. Both of those are the same two settings you can reach manually under Options in Cmd+Shift+5, so the takeover is not magic, it is a rewrite of two system preferences. The previous values are saved and put back when Tendedero quits or the option is disabled.

The watcher side of this is split across two files. ScreenshotWatcher notices new screenshots on disk, and Inbox handles the settings handover. ClipboardWatcher is a separate path for the other feature.

The practical consequence is a real dependency on that restore path. If Tendedero crashes hard instead of quitting, the system screenshot settings stay in the state it left them, and your Cmd+Shift+5 behaves differently until you change it back under Options. Nothing in the documentation describes a repair command for that case.

Hang copied images, with a filter that matters

Screenshots are only half of where images enter a Mac. Tendedero also watches the clipboard, and it does so selectively.

Images copied in Preview, or captured with Control held, hang on the line like anything else once you enable Hang copied images in the menu bar. Two exclusions are stated plainly. Anything copied alongside text, or alongside a file, is left alone. And anything a password manager marks as private is left alone. That second rule is the one to notice: it means the feature is written to cooperate with password managers that flag their own clipboard payloads, rather than grabbing whatever happens to be on the pasteboard.

The exclusion list is also why this is not a general clipboard manager. There is no searchable history, no keyboard navigation, no way to retrieve something you copied ten minutes ago. It handles image payloads on arrival, and nothing else.

Installing the release, or building it yourself

The published route is a disk image from the latest release, dragged into Applications, or Homebrew:

brew install --cask alejandrobujan/tap/tendedero

The app is signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple, so Gatekeeper treats it like any other download.

Building from source needs only the Swift toolchain, not the full Xcode, and the repository is a Swift package with `Package.swift` at the root:

git clone [email protected]:alejandrobujan/tendedero.git
cd tendedero
scripts/build-app.sh
open build/Tendedero.app

Two build caveats are documented and both will bite you. If you have the Command Line Tools for macOS 27 rather than Xcode, the script falls back to the macOS 26 SDK they install alongside, because the newer SDK needs a SwiftUI macro plugin that only Xcode ships. And local builds are signed ad hoc, so macOS asks again for Desktop access after every rebuild. That second one turns a three-line build into a loop you cannot script away cleanly.

A 12-file app that draws its own icon

The source layout is small enough to read in full, which is unusual for a polished macOS utility. AppDelegate owns the menu bar item, the shortcut, and revealing and tucking the line. LinePanel is the transparent strip along the top of the screen. LineView draws the line and decides where each photo hangs from it. PeggedView handles one photo, including the glass frame, the clip, and the swing and breeze animation. GrabArea is where click, long press, drag and drop are interpreted.

Then the less visible half: Markup opens the system Markup editor and saves the result back, Trim does the same for screen recordings, FullScreen knows when to stay hidden, and Line is the model of what is hanging and what can be done with it.

The artwork is generated too. `scripts/make-icon.swift` and `scripts/make-readme-art.swift` draw every image in the repository, the icon included, and `scripts/make-dmg.sh` produces the release disk image. Translations live in `Sources/Tendedero/Resources`, one `.lproj` folder per language, and `swift scripts/check-strings.swift` fails if a string is missing from any of them. There is a consistency check in the build rather than a hope.

Compatibility is macOS 14 Sonoma or later, on both Apple silicon and Intel, designed against macOS 27, at 1.7 MB.

What MIT covers here, and what it does not

The tech specs table splits the license rather than stating one identifier. The code is MIT. The name and the icon are not included. That is a narrower grant than a plain MIT repository and it matters if you plan to fork: you can read, modify and redistribute the Swift sources, but you cannot ship your build under the Tendedero name or reuse its icon.

What is left out of the picture is also a fact worth recording. The app makes no network requests, holds no account, and collects no analytics, and your screenshots never leave the Mac. For a utility whose entire input is screen content, that is the property that makes it usable on a work machine at all.

The app makes no network calls and fetches no configuration, so its behaviour comes from the installed build.

Editorial conclusion

Pick Tendedero if you take dozens of screenshots a day, work on macOS 14 or later, and have grown tired of the floating thumbnail covering the thing you just captured. Do not pick it if you rely on the current macOS screenshot folder arrangement, because accepting the first-launch prompt moves that decision into Inbox, and on Intel Macs there is no reason to expect any performance story at all. Verify three things before installing: that the shortcut does not collide with something in your own Shortcut under the menu bar, that you are on macOS 14 Sonoma or newer, and that you have read the LICENSE file, since MIT covers the code while the name and icon are explicitly excluded. The last push was on 2026-10-14 and three releases landed between 2026-10-10 and 2026-10-11, so this is not an abandoned weekend project; the app makes no network calls or configuration requests.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. alejandrobujan/tendedero on GitHub
2. Issues
3. Project website
4. README
5. Releases