The fastest way to give
Claude Code context

Pressing a hotkey is way faster than selecting a URL and copying it. Claude also gets more out of it.

Pasting a URL asks Claude to go and get the page. It fetches it as a stranger: logged out, cookie wall, paywall, or an app that renders nothing until you sign in. That is a tool call and a wait, and what comes back is often not the page on your screen.

A capture skips all of it. The page you are actually looking at, as clean markdown, already attached. It also works on Mac apps. Slack, Notion, a terminal, an error dialog. None of those have a URL to paste.

Slow and expensive. Driving a browser is a loop of navigate, screenshot, read, decide, repeat, and every screenshot in that loop costs tokens. A capture is one keypress and one payload, and you were already looking at the right page.

Same concept - Codex got there first. Same screenshot, same text pulled through the macOS accessibility APIs, same content you never scrolled to.

What is different is that you choose where the capture goes.

Say you have not touched Codex in an hour. You are reading something, you capture it, and it opens a brand new thread. So you go and find the conversation you actually wanted, come back, find your place on the page again, and capture a second time. That is most of my captures, and it is far more irritating than it sounds.

A capture here waits for your next message, in whatever session you send it from. You pick the destination by picking where you type. There is no wrong thread to climb back out of.

Codex also gives you no way to grab just the text. With stillpane you hold Shift along with the two Option keys, and you get the markdown without the screenshot, which saves tokens on anything long.

Codex can also only take a capture from its desktop app. stillpane works on every Claude Code surface: the CLI, the desktop app, VS Code, etc. And it is open source, so you can check all of this yourself.

An MCP server charges rent. Its tool schema rides along in every prompt of every session, costing tokens whether you capture that day or not, and each actual capture still costs a round trip: Claude decides to call the tool, calls it, waits, reads the result, all to deliver something that was in front of you the whole time. A hook stays out of the prompt entirely and costs nothing until the moment a capture attaches. No schema, no call, no wait. You press two keys and it is already there.

Half of it is a plugin. The hook that attaches a capture to your next message lives inside Claude Code. The other half cannot: a skill runs when Claude calls it, and a capture happens earlier, while you are reading the other window.

Catching that moment takes a real Mac app, with the permissions macOS requires to read another app's window. That is the menu bar app.

stillpane operates no server and reports nothing about you or your usage. A capture is written to a folder on your Mac and deleted after 24 hours.

When you attach one to a message, Claude Code sends it to your configured model provider as part of that conversation, the same as anything you type, and that provider's retention policy applies from there.

Text quality tracks what the app exposes. Native apps and browsers are rich. Electron apps like Notion and Slack work in full, though the first capture after one launches takes a couple of seconds while its text is built. Canvas-drawn interfaces such as games and some design tools fall back to the screenshot alone, which is the same limit Codex hits.

Two hard limits beyond that: it needs macOS 14 or later, and captures land in Claude Code running on your Mac, so a session in the cloud cannot see them.