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Getting started

Install Noru Flow, grant Screen Recording, take your first capture, and connect your AI agent. About five minutes.

Install

Noru Flow is a native macOS app, free, and it runs entirely on your Mac. Download the latest build, open the disk image, and drag Noru Flow into your Applications folder. The build is signed and notarized by Apple, so it opens without a Gatekeeper warning.

Launch it and Noru lives in your menu bar. There is no window to manage and no account to create. Click the menu-bar icon any time to reach Settings, Shortcuts, and the capture controls.

Grant permissions

macOS gates screen capture behind a system permission. Noru asks for one required grant and one optional one.

Screen Recordingrequired Lets Noru see what's on your screen. Without it, macOS hands back a blank or redacted image and a capture looks broken.

Accessibilityoptional Powers the Right Option one-handed trigger. Skip it and the menu-bar button and keyboard shortcuts still capture normally.

The first-run welcome card walks you through both. You can grant them any time later in System Settings, Privacy and Security, Screen Recording, then relaunch Noru so macOS picks up the change.

Take your first capture

One key, two gestures. Tap to grab a single thing, hold to draw a region. Nothing else to learn.

⌘⇧1tap Grab the window under your cursor.

⌘⇧1hold Draw a region to capture.

⌘⇧2 Capture the whole screen, instantly.

right ⌥tap or hold The same grammar, one-handed. Needs Accessibility.

After your first capture a small bar appears. That bar is home: it holds your captures, a note field, and the capture modes (region, window, full screen, and video). You can drag it anywhere or nudge it with the arrow keys. Everything you capture stays on your Mac.

Tip

The two hotkeys are editable in Settings, Hotkeys. The full grammar, including the in-selector keys, is always one click away under the menu-bar icon, Shortcuts.

Connect your agent

Capturing is only half of it. The point of Noru is that your AI coding agent can pull what you just captured into the conversation you're already in, with no copy and paste. That runs over MCP, the Model Context Protocol, and the server ships inside the app.

Open Settings, Connect to your AI and click Connect. Noru registers its capture server with the coding agents it finds on your Mac. Prefer the terminal? Run:

terminal

noru-mcp install

Both do the same thing, and both are safe to re-run. For the full picture, including which agents auto-pull and which need one extra step, see Connect your agent.

Use it in your agent

Capture something, switch to your agent, and refer to your screen the way you naturally would:

"Why is this button misaligned?" or "Fix the error in this screenshot."

Claude Code pulls the capture on its own from the tool's description. Cursor and VS Code Copilot need one more step, a short rule pasted once into their global User Rules, before they'll pull automatically. That paste is covered in the Cursor and VS Code rule.

Not on an MCP client? Any AI still works. Use Copy bundle for your AI on the bar and paste it into a chat.