A native macOS paint app: classic Paint tools, modern finish.
macOS ships no raster paint app — Preview's Markup annotates, Freeform is vector, and the free simple option (Paintbrush) has been unmaintained for years. Daub fills that gap: open an image, draw on it, save it.
git clone <this repo> daub && cd daub
make install # builds, installs to /Applications, clears quarantine flags
open /Applications/Daub.appmake install is the whole story. It needs the Swift toolchain (Xcode or Command Line
Tools) and nothing else — no Xcode project, no package manager, no signing certificate.
| Command | What it does |
|---|---|
make |
Build build/Daub.app |
make run |
Build and launch it |
make install |
Build and install into /Applications |
make install DESTDIR=~/Applications |
Install somewhere else |
make uninstall |
Remove the installed copy |
make clean |
Delete build artefacts |
If macOS refuses to open it: Daub is ad-hoc signed, not notarized, so a copy that
arrives over a share or a download carries a quarantine flag. make install clears it. For
a bundle you copied by hand:
xattr -cr /Applications/Daub.app # -cr, not -dr: -dr stops at the first file without the flagDraw something. Daub opens on a white 1024×768 canvas with the pencil selected. Drag to draw in the foreground colour; drag with the right button to draw in the background colour — that second one is the habit from classic Paint that people miss most.
Pick colours. Click a swatch in the bottom strip for the foreground, ⌥-click (or
right-click → Set as Background) for the background. The two overlapping wells on the
left open the full colour picker. X swaps them.
Undo is 32 steps deep (⌘Z / ⇧⌘Z) and covers everything — strokes, shapes, text, fills, rotations, canvas resizes. On a very large picture, steps that change every pixel at once (invert, a full-canvas paste) are the one exception: Daub keeps the most recent of those it can hold in memory rather than all 32.
Paste a screenshot. ⌃⇧⌘4 to grab part of the screen, then ⇧⌘V in Daub: the picture becomes the screenshot, at its own size, shrunk to fit the window if it is bigger. Plain ⌘V pastes into the picture you already have — and if what you paste is bigger than the canvas, the canvas grows to hold it rather than cropping it.
Save with ⌘S. PNG, JPEG or TIFF, decided by the extension you type.
Each has a bare-letter shortcut — no modifier, just the letter, and it never steals a keystroke from the text tool.
| Tool | Key | Notes | |
|---|---|---|---|
| ✎ | Pencil | P |
One hard pixel, no anti-aliasing, ever. Size 1–16 px. This is the tool for pixel work. |
| 🖌 | Brush | B |
Smooth round stroke, 1–48 px, with an opacity slider. |
| ✳ | Airbrush | A |
Sprays while you hold still, 30 puffs a second. Radius and flow. |
| ⌫ | Eraser | E |
Paints the background colour — or rubs through to transparency on a canvas that has alpha (see below). |
| 💧 | Fill | F |
Flood fill with a tolerance slider for anti-aliased or JPEG-noisy edges. |
| 💉 | Pick Colour | I |
Click to sample; snaps back to the tool you were using. Right-click samples into the background. |
| T | Text | T |
Click, type, press ⏎ to bake it in. Escape cancels. Font and size in the sidebar. |
| ⧉ | Clone Stamp | K |
⌥-click sets the source, then drag to paint from it. Copies the picture as it was at the start of the stroke, so crossing your own source never smears. |
| 🎨 | Replace Colour | G |
Click a colour: every pixel of it becomes the foreground colour (right-click: the background colour). Tolerance widens the match; a selection limits where it applies. See Swapping one colour for another. |
| ▨ | Gradient | Y |
Drag to set direction and length: foreground → background. Clipped to the selection if there is one. |
| ╱ | Line | L |
⇧ constrains to 45°. |
| ▭ | Rectangle | R |
⇧ makes it square. |
| ▢ | Rounded Rectangle | D |
|
| ◯ | Ellipse | C |
⇧ makes it a circle. |
| ⬚ | Select | S |
Rectangular marquee — see below. |
Shape tools have a three-way style picker: outline · filled · filled with outline. Outline uses the dragging button's colour; the fill uses the other one.
| Key | Does |
|---|---|
X |
Swap foreground and background |
[ ] |
Shrink / grow the current tool |
| ⇧ + drag | Constrain lines to 45°, rectangles to squares, ellipses to circles |
| Right-drag | Paint with the background colour, any tool |
| ⇧⌘V | New from Clipboard — the clipboard picture becomes the canvas, at its size |
| ⌘V | Paste into this picture; the canvas grows if the paste is bigger than it |
| ⌘R | Canvas Size… |
| ⌘0 / ⌘1 | Fit in window / actual size |
| ⌘+ / ⌘− | Zoom in / out (or pinch on a trackpad) |
| ⌘⇧K | Crop to selection |
| ⌫ | Clear the selection to the background colour |
| ⌥ + drag | Duplicate a selection instead of moving it |
| ⌘? | Open the in-app help (tools, keys and recipes, with a search field) |
| Escape | Drop the selection (or cancel a move in progress) |
- Pick Select (
S) and drag a rectangle. Marching ants mark it. - Drag inside it to move it. The pixels lift out, leaving the background colour behind. Hold ⌥ as you start the drag to leave the original where it was and move a copy. Arrow keys nudge by 1 px, ⇧+arrows by 10.
- ⌘C / ⌘X / ⌘V copy, cut and paste. A paste arrives as a floating selection at the top left, already selected, so you can drag it into place. If it is larger than the canvas, the canvas grows to hold all of it — undo puts both the pixels and the old size back in one step. To have the clipboard picture replace the canvas instead, use ⇧⌘V.
- The move is committed when you switch tools, deselect, press Escape, or save — all in one undo step, so ⌘Z puts the pixels back where they started.
- ⌘⇧K crops the whole canvas to the selection.
Selections are rectangular.
Two ways in, and the difference is whether you are keeping what is already on the canvas.
| Does | |
|---|---|
| ⇧⌘V — File ▸ New from Clipboard | The clipboard picture becomes the picture. The canvas is resized to exactly its dimensions, and zoomed to fit the window if it is too big to show at 1:1. Asks before discarding unsaved work, like Open. |
| ⌘V — Edit ▸ Paste | Drops the clipboard picture into the picture you have, floating at the top left so you can drag it where you want. If it does not fit, the canvas grows to the size that holds it, padded with the background colour. |
So the screenshot workflow is: ⌃⇧⌘4, drag a region, switch to Daub, ⇧⌘V, annotate, ⌘S. Nothing to resize by hand, and nothing quietly cropped.
Daub reads TIFF, PNG and file references off the clipboard, which covers macOS screenshots, copies from Preview, Safari and Finder, and most other apps. If there is no picture on the clipboard, ⇧⌘V says so rather than doing nothing.
The canvas is opaque by default, exactly like Paint. Three ways to get alpha:
Open or import one that already has it. A PNG with transparency — or a window screenshot (⌃⇧⌘4 then Space, which has see-through corners) — keeps it, whether you open the file or bring it in with ⇧⌘V. The checkerboard tells you it is there.
Start transparent. ⇧⌘N — File → New with Transparent Background. The canvas shows a
checkerboard, the eraser rubs through to nothing, and ⌘S to .png keeps the holes.
Knock out a background you already have. Open the picture, then:
- Set the background well to the colour you want gone — the eyedropper (
I) with a right-click samples straight into it. - Raise Fill → Tolerance if the edges are soft or the file is a JPEG (try 20–40).
- Image → Make Background Colour Transparent.
Everything within tolerance of that colour disappears across the whole picture, the checkerboard appears, and saving as PNG keeps it. Daub tells you if nothing matched rather than silently doing nothing.
Saving a transparent canvas as JPEG flattens it onto white first — JPEG has no alpha, and writing one straight out would turn every hole black.
Replace Colour (G) is a whole-area operation, not a brush: you click one pixel and
every pixel that matches it changes at once.
- The foreground colour is what you get; right-click to swap to the background colour instead.
- Tolerance widens the match. Flat art needs 0. Anything that has been through JPEG, or any anti-aliased drawing, needs 15–40 or you will leave a fringe of near-misses behind.
- Draw a selection first and only that area changes — the way to recolour one button without touching every other pixel of that colour in the picture. Clicking outside the selection does nothing (and beeps); ⌘D deselects.
- Soft edges stay soft. A pixel that is half-covered keeps its coverage and only changes hue, so a swap does not turn a smooth edge into a stair-step.
- Empty is not a colour. On a canvas with transparency, clicking the empty area matches the empty area only — never the paint sitting on it — and fills it with the new colour. The reverse of that is Image ▸ Make Background Colour Transparent, which is the same operation with "nothing" as the replacement.
- A click that changes no pixels costs no undo step.
| Item | Notes |
|---|---|
| Canvas Size… (⌘R) | Crop or extend, anchored top-left, padding in the background colour — or tick Scale the picture to fit to resample instead. |
| Crop to Selection (⌘⇧K) | |
| Make Background Colour Transparent | Above. |
| Flip Horizontal / Vertical | |
| Rotate Left / Right | |
| Invert Colours (⌘I) | |
| Clear Image (⌘⌫) | Fills with the background colour, or empties the canvas if it holds alpha. |
Zoom runs 25% – 3200%, by ⌘+/⌘−, the menu in the status bar, pinch on a trackpad, or ⌘0 to fit the window. From 800% a faint pixel grid appears — toggle it in the sidebar or under View. The status bar shows the pointer's pixel coordinate (top-left origin, like every other image tool), the canvas size, and the selection size while you drag one.
Help ▸ Daub Help (⌘?) opens a panel with every tool, every key and the recipes above, with a search field across the lot — type "transparent" or "clone" rather than hunting sections. It closes with the drawing.
Touch a blemish out of a photo
Open it → Clone Stamp (K) → set Width to about twice the blemish → ⌥-click a clean
patch nearby → drag over the blemish. Turn Smooth edges on so the patch blends.
Make a logo's white background transparent
Open it → eyedropper (I) right-click on the white → Image → Make Background Colour
Transparent → if a white fringe survives, ⌘Z, raise Fill Tolerance to ~30, try again →
⌘S as logo.png.
Recolour something
Select the area first if only part of the picture should change. Then Replace Colour
(G), Tolerance ~20, foreground set to the new colour, click the old
colour. Every pixel of it in the picture changes at once.
A quick title card
⇧⌘N for a transparent canvas → Gradient (Y), drag top-to-bottom → Text (T),
size 72, click, type, ⏎ → ⌘S as PNG.
Pixel art ⌘R to set a small canvas (say 64×64) → ⌘0 to fit → Pencil at size 1 → the grid appears past 800% and every dab is exactly one pixel.
It anti-aliases the brush, the clone stamp and the four shape tools. It is most visible on a diagonal at a width of 1–3 px, or zoomed past 400%: off gives you hard stair-steps, on gives you grey in-between pixels.
It does nothing for the pencil, eraser, airbrush, fill or text, which are pixel-exact — so the checkbox is hidden for those rather than shown having no effect.
MIT — see LICENSE. Use it, fork it, ship it.