ItsPaint

Paintbrush, the macOS MS Paint clone, has not shipped since 2021 and is
Intel-only. Windows 11 Paint has meanwhile become a real editor — layers,
transparency, generative fill — but it wants a Microsoft account and, for the
interesting parts, a Copilot+ NPU. On macOS the only thing in the gap is Markup,
which cannot number the steps of a bug report or redact a token.

ItsPaint is a native AppKit paint and markup app for that gap. Twelve tools,
fifteen shapes, both colours and the palette visible at once, and no workspace to
set up before the first stroke.

What it is for

- Paste a screenshot, drop auto-numbered step badges on it, pixelate the API key,
and send it — the two jobs Markup will not do.
- Instant Alpha and one-command background removal, which declines rather than
guessing: if the flood would take essentially the whole canvas, nothing changes
and it says so.
- Paste an image larger than the canvas and the canvas grows to hold it, so
nothing is cropped when you place it.
- Rotate by any angle, with the canvas growing to fit the corners.
- Export to PNG, JPEG, TIFF, BMP, GIF, HEIC, AVIF, PDF and ICO.

What is underneath

Two layers: a UI-free drawing engine of 5,838 lines, and 8,251 lines of AppKit
and SwiftUI on top of it. Pixels are premultiplied RGBA8, every edit returns the
rectangle it changed, and the canvas redraws only that area. No third-party
dependencies at all.

Documents are a PNG with a JSON sidecar, so the artwork opens in anything, with
or without ItsPaint.

No network, and it is checkable

Neither com.apple.security.network.client nor .server is requested, so the
sandbox refuses a socket whatever the code asks for. otool -L on the shipped
binary finds no CFNetwork, no Network.framework and nothing outside the
system on either architecture. A grep of the source for the networking APIs
returns nothing. The three commands are in the README; the point is that you do
not have to take the claim on trust.

Free, MIT, notarised, macOS 14 or later. brew install --cask joshlin2201/itspaint/itspaint, or the disk image from GitHub Releases.

Public beta — the version number is honest about that.