The number of screenshots Heretic Lazy Shot can pin on top of your desktop today is zero.
Not one. Not behind a flag. Zero.
We set out to build the reference-window workflow this page was going to teach. The first draft walked through pinning a spec next to a running build, as if the feature worked. It does not. The codebase holds a stub with a placeholder window, and this rewrite is the audit that draft should have been.
Every "compare two things" task on a computer falls into the same loop: look at A, switch to B, forget half of A, switch back, repeat. Task-switching research keeps confirming what any afternoon of detailed work already knows. Each flip costs seconds and short-term memory, and two hundred flips a day adds up to a real hour handed to the window manager.
People have known the fix for years. Take a screenshot and pin it always on top: a small borderless window floating above everything while the work happens underneath. The reference cannot scroll away, reload, or get buried. Taping a card to the edge of the monitor does the same job with worse battery life.
Snipaste built a genuine cult on this loop. F1 to snip, F3 to pin, free for personal use, one job done well. The earlier draft of this article claimed Snipaste's heart is on Windows and the Mac goes without. Snipaste has a macOS version, free for personal use with a paid Pro tier. That first claim was not positioning. It was an unchecked fact.
1. Spec versus build. The Figma frame floats next to the running app. Padding off by four pixels stays invisible across an alt-tab and turns obvious side by side. This serves designers reviewing implementation and developers checking their own work first.
2. Data entry from a table. Numbers from a dashboard, an invoice, a spreadsheet sent as a picture. Source pinned above the form, one field of view. The error rate drops for the same reason it does with paper.
3. Code review against the diff. The old behavior floats while the reviewer reads the fix: an error state, a console trace, the previous UI. "Does this change address what the screenshot shows" becomes a glance instead of an archaeology session.
4. The bug repro next to the fix. The moment the bug happens, the capture floats above the editor while the fix lands, and the before-state stays on screen for the final check. This pairs with a full bug-report workflow, annotated, numbered, and redacted, where the pin is step one.
5. A reference in another language or format. UI strings in translation, a slide layout to match, a chart style to reproduce, a checklist on a PDF page. Anything where the job is "look at this while the hands do that."
We open the repository and trace the feature end to end. commands/pin.rs knows how to build a borderless, always-on-top window. A /pin route exists. The chain runs into the frontend, where PinWindow.tsx renders a placeholder. Then we grep for callers of pinScreenshot, the wrapper that should start the whole thing. The count comes back zero.
A route doesn't make a feature. A caller does.
A backend command nobody can reach isn't a feature. It's inventory. We built the oven and skipped the kitchen.
The killed draft told the reader to "set it up once," then pin, drag, repeat. Nothing exists to set up. Quoting steps for a stub would not be documentation. It would be a bet placed with the reader's time.
No ship date gets stated here. What exists in the code exists. What doesn't, doesn't.
The parts around the missing pin are real and testable. Region capture runs a 4× magnifier loupe with live pixel coordinates and a W×H label. The editor carries 11 annotation tools, and markers live as metadata on a non-destructive layer, so edits stay reversible. Every capture lands in a searchable library with a keyword field and soft delete. The built-in MCP server exposes 23 tools, so an agent can read the library even while a human cannot pin from it.
That is the product as shipped. Not a workflow. A toolbox with one drawer still empty.
If pinning is the whole job, the answer today is Snipaste. Free for personal use, F1 and F3, on Windows and on the Mac. Lazy Shot's case was going to be the tool around the pin: the loupe, the library, the annotations, the agent access. That case stands on the day the pin works. Until then the comparison has one line.
Snipaste pins. Lazy Shot doesn't.
If a pinned reference is what the afternoon needs, install Snipaste and get back to work. If the question was whether we say so out loud, the answer is this page.
Heretic Lazy Shot is a screenshot, annotation, and beautification tool for macOS and Windows, built for humans and agents. One-time license at €14.99 for one device or €29.99 for three, no subscription, no account, no telemetry. Activation happens online, with an offline grace period after. The trial ships inside the download, no card. Try Lazy Shot →
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