If you want to highlight something, or you have an idea you want to illustrate, there’s often no better way than to just draw on your screen.

Bananotate is a classic desktop annotation tool that packs a multitude of editing features and is built with keyboard use in mind. It’s quite versatile, with a minimalistic interface, command palette, and customizable hotkeys.

You can use a hotkey to bring up the app interface, which disables desktop interaction and allows you to draw on your screen. The toolbar is unobtrusive and provides access to commonly-used drawing tools.

Bananotate allows you to draw freehand, insert shapes, text, or images, capture and duplicate screen content, and move and resize items. Although it’s an annotation tool, it has all the editing features you’d expect from a dedicated drawing app.

The toolbar itself only contains a few of the app’s features. It’s a lot more powerful than it seems at first glance, but you need to access the command palette to see its full capabilities. It’s only a hotkey away, and you can easily filter commands to find what you need.

Every feature has an associated keyboard shortcut, and they are all customizable. While it may take some getting used to, it’s a very advanced and efficient utility once you get to grips with the hotkeys and they become second nature.

That’s not to say home users can’t take advantage of it, but it seems to be mostly aimed at professionals. The free version is usable if you don’t need some of the app’s advanced functions, which have a limited number of daily uses.

I would mostly recommend Bananotate to professionals who need a powerful and efficient way to draw on their screen during presentations or illustrate concepts without booting up a dedicated graphic editor.