Using Bevy

Getting started

Bevy runs on macOS 12.3 or later and lives in your menu bar. On a MacBook with a notch, its panel grows right out of the notch; press ⌥⇧⌘B or click Bevy's menu-bar icon to open it.

1. The first time you capture, macOS asks for Screen Recording permission. Allow it, then reopen Bevy.
2. Choose a Bevy folder in Settings › General. Each deck becomes a folder inside it.
3. Optionally turn on Launch at login so your shortcuts are always ready.

Capturing

Press ⌥⇧⌘4 and drag over an area. A soft glow follows your selection so you can see exactly what Bevy will take. While selecting, press Space to switch between an area and a whole window, or Return with nothing selected to take the entire screen. ⌥⇧⌘5 and ⌥⇧⌘3 jump straight to window and screen.

When you let go, the capture flies up into the notch and lands in your Inbox, where it's given a name from what's in it.

Capture and Edit

⌥⇧⌘E freezes the capture right where it was and opens a tool bar beside it: Blur, Black Out, Box and Crop, plus the deck to save to. Handy for hiding an email address before you share.

Recording

Press ⌥⇧⌘6, choose a region or window, and pick your options: Camera shows you in a bubble you can drag to any edge, Microphone records your voice, and Zoom on Clicks smoothly pushes in wherever you click. While recording, the controls live in the notch: ⌥⇧⌘P pauses, ⌥⇧⌘R starts over, ⌥⇧⌘⌫ discards and ⌥⇧⌘Z zooms in on the pointer. Press ⌥⇧⌘6 again to finish.

Decks

A deck is a group of captures for one job: a bug, a design you're copying, a page you're building. Every deck is a real folder, and files are named after what's in them (for example pay-button-hover.png).

• New deck: in the panel, scroll past your last deck and keep pulling, then let go.
• Send straight to a deck: ⌃⌥1 to ⌃⌥4 capture into the deck in that slot. Pinned decks come first, then the ones you used most recently.
• Project folders: point a deck at your project and its files move there, next to your code.
• Finder works too: drop images into a deck's folder and Bevy adopts them; rename or delete in Finder and Bevy keeps up.

Handing off to AI

Drag a whole deck into ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor or any app that accepts files. It arrives as a pack: numbered images sized for AI, plus a manifest.md that lists each one with its title, caption and source, so the model knows what it's looking at and in what order.

• Drag or copy single captures to hand over the original files.
• Zip Deck saves the pack as a .zip beside the deck's folder.
• ⌃⌥V copies the newest capture in your Inbox; press it again to add the next one.

Smart Image Text

Press ⌥⇧⌘T and drag over anything with text in it: a video, a slide, a screenshot, an app that won't let you select. Bevy reads it and copies it, and the glow unravels into highlights over every line it found.

• Wrapped lines rejoin into paragraphs; headings and lists keep their shape.
• Code keeps its indentation, and tables paste into Numbers or Notes as real tables.
• Links, email addresses and QR codes are underlined; click one to open it.
• Hold ⌥ as you let go to copy the text exactly as laid out, or ⌘ to copy it as code. Choose Smart, Plain Text or Markdown in Settings › Capture.

Shortcuts

These are the defaults. Change any of them in Settings › Capture.