Pictor
Pick a colour, then move the pointer over the background to draw.

Go on, draw on it.

Free · Open source · macOS 14+

Pictorby MakioThe simple paint app your Mac never had

Missing Paint on your Mac? macOS never shipped a simple paint program — Pictor is one: sixteen classic tools, a 28-colour palette and a bucket that respects a one-pixel outline. No smoothing, no account, no subscription.

Download for macOSView source

Version 1.1.0 · Universal · Signed and notarised · MIT licence

What Pictor looks like

The Pictor window on macOS: the sixteen-tool box on the left, a drawing of a house with a sun and grass on the canvas, and the 28-colour palette along the bottom.
The toolbox, the palette and the status bar — where you remember them.

All sixteen tools

A classic 2 × 8 toolbox, with the single-key shortcuts you never actually forgot.

  • Free-Form Select
  • Select
  • Eraser
  • Fill With Color
  • Pick Color
  • Magnifier
  • Pencil
  • Brush
  • Airbrush
  • Text
  • Line
  • Curve
  • Rectangle
  • Polygon
  • Ellipse
  • Rounded Rectangle

Pixel-perfect, literally

Every tool writes whole pixels into a raster buffer. Zoom to 3200% and you get hard edges and a pixel grid, not a blurry approximation of what you drew.

Shape previews are rasterised on every frame of the drag, so what you see while dragging is byte-for-byte what you get when you let go.

Pictor zoomed to 800% showing the pixel grid and the hard staircase edge between a brown shape and a cyan background.

Features

No smoothing, ever
Nearest-neighbour all the way up to 3200%, with a pixel grid past 4×. The pixel you click is the pixel that changes.
Two colours, two buttons
Left click paints the foreground, right click the background — for every tool, shape fills included.
A bucket that holds
Four-connected flood fill with optional tolerance. Ellipses and rounded rectangles come out watertight, so it can't leak.
Real Mac citizen
PNG, JPEG, TIFF, BMP and GIF through the document architecture, so Open Recent, Revert, printing and autosave prompts all work.

Questions

Is there a Microsoft Paint for Mac?
No — Microsoft has never released Paint for macOS. Pictor is a free, open-source alternative: a native Mac app with sixteen classic tools, a 28-colour palette and no smoothing, for when you just want to draw, crop or mark up a picture.
Is Pictor made by Microsoft?
No. Pictor is an independent project by Manuel Rizzo, written from scratch in Swift and AppKit. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Microsoft and contains no Microsoft code or assets.
Is it really free?
Yes. Pictor is MIT licensed, with no account, no subscription, no ads and no analytics inside the app. The source code is on GitHub.
Which files can it open and save?
PNG, JPEG, TIFF, BMP and GIF. Transparency survives a PNG round trip; formats that cannot hold it are flattened onto white.
Wasn't this app called Paint?
Yes, up to version 1.0.2. It was renamed Pictor in 1.1.0 — same app, same tools. Your settings carry over, and older copies are offered the update automatically.

Get Pictor

A macOS 14+ universal build, signed with a Developer ID and notarised by Apple, so it opens with a double-click. Free forever, MIT licensed.

Download for macOSAll releases

Pictor is free and always will be. If it saved you a trip to a Windows VM, buy me a coffee.