Captions are the whole point. Every export leaves Handcut with no watermark on any tier — which means the only thing carrying the app's name out into a feed is how the captions look. So they are not three neutral defaults. They are designed to be recognisable after a one-second glimpse, and to stay legible over footage nobody has seen yet.
Every caption tool can highlight the word being spoken. Handcut marks a second word: the one that actually carries the sentence — a number, a negation, an absolute. It is picked from what you said, not from a template, and it does not move with the audio. One word per caption at most, never three captions in a row, never more than about a third of a video.
That restraint is the feature. Emphasis everywhere is emphasis nowhere, and the reason nobody does this by hand is that it means styling one word per caption across two hundred captions. It runs entirely on your device and produces the same result every time.
Warm educator. Each line sits in its own dark capsule with a violet hairline, so a stacked caption reads as a stack of lit tags rather than as a subtitle box. The most legible style over cluttered footage, and the default for auto-captions.
The word being spoken gets a travelling violet block. The word Handcut chose gets the whole capsule: it flips to violet, and the type stays white. Legibility never depends on the colour — the readable pair is white on violet at 5.6:1, and white on ink at 19.9:1.
Minimal luxury. Near-black type, widely tracked, on a soft off-white scrim. Built for property tours, product films and anything where a loud caption would cheapen the shot.
Because the scrim carries the legibility, the worst case is a property of the style rather than of your footage: 17.6:1 over a white frame, 14.7:1 over a black one. Words you have not reached yet sit back rather than disappearing, and the word Handcut chose is underlined in a single thin violet rule — the quietest way to say this one.
Block capitals, hard shadow. The loud one. Included free alongside Lantern and Silk.
Spark is being redrawn. It predates the current caption work and has not been through the same verification the other two have, so we are not describing it as a signature style until it has. It works, it ships, and it is free; it is just not finished.
Full technical specification, including every contrast measurement and the rules that choose the emphasised word: see the design notes shipped with the source.