Orbit

Orbit is a free, open-source macOS screen recorder, screenshot tool, and video editor—a Screen Studio and CleanShot X alternative that lives in the menu bar. Forked from BetterCapture, it records a screen, window, or area through ScreenCaptureKit alongside a telemetry sidecar of cursor positions, clicks, scrolls, and key codes, then turns the take into a polished video with automatic zooms on clicks and typing, a smoothed redrawn cursor, keystroke overlays, and styled 16:9, 9:16, 1:1, or 4:3 canvases. Exports go out as HEVC, H.264, or ProRes 4444 with transparency. A local MCP server lets Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, and OpenCode inspect a web page, script hovers, clicks, and typing on it, and render a frame-perfect recording straight into the editor.

Build StackSwift, SwiftUI, AppKit, ScreenCaptureKit, AVFoundation, Core Image, MCP Swift SDK

Challenges

  • Keeping the editor preview and the exported file pixel-identical while AVFoundation requests frames out of order when scrubbing and in parallel during export.

  • Turning raw telemetry—cursor samples, clicks, keystrokes—into zooms and cursor motion that read as directed rather than jittery.

  • Letting cuts and trims move freely without invalidating every zoom, highlight, and overlay placed on the timeline.

  • Giving coding agents a way to record a page from a sentence, across agents that each store MCP config in a different file and format.

Solutions

  • Routed preview and export through one custom AVVideoCompositing compositor and a pure FrameRenderer, so what you see is what you export by construction.

  • Integrated springs, smoothing, and auto-zoom once into precomputed sampled tracks, so drawing a frame is lookups plus a small Core Image graph with no simulation state.

  • Stored every effect in source time and isolated cuts in a single TimeMap from output time to source time.

  • Shipped a local MCP server with inspect_page, record_page, and export_recording tools, plus one-click Connect per agent in Settings that only adds Orbit's own entry.