The big chat suites route your screen through their clouds, idle like space heaters, and still won’t let you draw an arrow. So I built PairScreen — a menu-bar Mac app where voice, screens and ink travel directly between machines. The server only introduces peers; it never sees a pixel.

What it pulls off

• Absurdly light. A live two-way call, both sides sharing 1440p screens and drawing on each other, runs at ~8.5% of a single CPU core. Idle sits at a flat 0%. Video encoding rides the Apple Silicon Media Engine — the dedicated hardware most apps leave idle.
• Up to 6 people, everyone shares at once. No presenter role, no taking turns. Multiple screens open side by side.
• Draw on anything. Everyone annotates any shared screen, including your own while you share. Ink fades on its own, or pin it to stay and erase it stroke by stroke.
• No account. Your identity is an Ed25519 keypair generated on your Mac. No email, no password, no profile.
• Truly peer-to-peer. After the handshake, media flows directly between Macs over WebRTC, end-to-end encrypted with DTLS-SRTP. The coordinator server only helps peers find each other; it never carries audio, video or drawings.

No AI sidebar, no cloud drive, no premium wall. It helps you work with a friend and gets out of the way.

It’s in alpha and free — try it, then open Activity Monitor during a call and compare it to whatever you use today. That comparison is the whole pitch.