Docs

Everything Comms does, on one page

Comms lives in the menu bar. You reach it with two keys. Everything else is a letter or a click on the palette. Every key on this page is a default — rebind any of them in Settings.

⇧⌘RRecord. Press again to stop.
⇧⌘DDraw. Press again to put the pen away.

01Record

⇧⌘R starts a recording of the screen under your cursor, with system audio and your microphone. Press it again to stop. The palette’s target button switches between a screen, a window, or an area you draw; the microphone button picks the input. The trash button, shown while recording, discards the take: no file, nothing sent.

02Draw

⇧⌘D puts a pen on the screen. While the pen is out, the keyboard is Comms’s. Single letters do the work:

1 – 5Colour: red, blue, green, yellow, white
SSize: thin, medium, thick
CClear every stroke
⌘ZUndo the last stroke

⇧⌘D or Esc puts the pen away and hands the keyboard back to the app you are showing. Strokes fade on their own; set how long they stay in Settings.

03Agents

The send button opens AGENTS: every connected agent, where it runs, how long it has been up, and what became of the last take you sent it — sent, then claimed. Connect an agent… copies one line. Paste it into Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Conductor, or anything with a terminal, and the agent appears in the list:

/Applications/Comms.app/Contents/Helpers/comms listen

When you stop a recording the bar turns into a chip per agent. Click one and the brief lands in that agent’s session. Dismiss, and the take is kept and sent to no one. Hover a row in AGENTS for a red X to hang up.

04Your recordings

Each recording is a .comms package in ~/Movies/Comms, named by date and time. Double-click one to open its page. Inside:

  • video.mp4 — the recording
  • transcript.json — what you said, timed, transcribed on your Mac
  • session.json — every stroke, what it circled, and what you said while drawing it
  • annotations/ — a crop of the screen for each drawing
  • index.html — a page that plays it all back

Agents read the same folder. comms session <folder> prints the brief. The command line tool lives inside the app at /Applications/Comms.app/Contents/Helpers/comms; run it with no arguments for the full list.

05Settings

The gear on the palette. Pen: colour, size, and how long strokes stay before they fade — 1, 3, or 6 seconds, or never. Recording: where to save, whether to reveal the file in Finder when it lands, whether to copy its path, and the language for transcription. Keyboard shortcuts: every key on this page, ⇧⌘R and ⇧⌘D included — click the caps, press the keys you want, ⌫ brings a default back. Useful when another app already claims a combination.

06Permissions

Two: Screen Recording and Microphone. macOS asks on first use. If a toggle shows on but nothing records, open Permissions… from the menu bar icon and follow the steps there.

07Updates

The app checks once a day and offers new versions in place. Check for Updates… in the menu bar icon does it now. What ships in each build is on the changelog.

08Quit

Comms is a menu bar app: it is not in the Dock, ⌘Tab, or Force Quit. Right-click the mark in the menu bar and choose Quit Comms — it is in Settings too.

09Stuck?

Send Feedback… in the menu bar, or email hello@trycomms.app. A human reads it.