Quickshort

Press the global hotkey, drag a region — even across monitors — then save a pixel-perfect PNG, copy it, or pull its text out with the OS-native OCR engine. Draw on it first if you like. No Electron, no runtime, no model downloads.

Features

• Multi-monitor selection — drag across monitor boundaries; per-monitor crops are stitched through a virtual coordinate space
• Full physical resolution — Retina and mixed-DPI displays are captured and stitched at native framebuffer pixels, never downsampled
• Annotations — pen, arrow, rect, ellipse, marker, text, pixelate, undo/redo, stroke sizes, color palette — rendered at output resolution and confined to the captured region. Text gets real font sizes (12–48), a bold toggle, a proper editing box (arrows, selection, ⌘A) and Vietnamese IME input. Shapes and text stay editable blocks: the Select tool picks, drags and deletes them
• Link sharing — one click uploads the shot as WebP (q95, roughly half a PNG's size) to a Cloudflare Worker (relay/share/) and copies an unguessable URL that expires in 3 days. No account, no local server, and the process does not need to stay alive
• OCR with per-OS engines — Vision VNRecognizeTextRequest on macOS, Windows.Media.Ocr on Windows, Tesseract on Linux with script auto-detection (ocr_lang = "auto", OSD pass picks eng/jpn/vie/…); nothing ships in the binary
• Screen recording — ⌘R records the selected region to mp4 at 15fps: PipeWire push on Wayland, re-capture polling on macOS (ScreenCaptureKit) and Windows (GDI). Encoding runs on a worker through ffmpeg — slow encodes drop frames instead of shortening the clip (needs ffmpeg on PATH; installers surface it)
• Scrolling capture — ⌘G re-grabs the region while you scroll and stitches the frames into one tall image — docs, threads, chat logs
• Pin & beautify — Pin floats a capture as an always-on-top reference window; Beautify mounts it on a soft gradient backdrop with rounded corners and a drop shadow
• Resident tray app — menu-bar icon, global hotkey, launch at login, recent captures, auto-update
• Settings window — paged preferences (Capture, General, Shortcuts, Appearance, Storage, About): rebindable ⌘-action keys, accent color, retention policy for old captures, one-click update install
• One-shot CLI — quickshort --capture fits into scripts and window manager keybinds

Install

macOS

DMG — grab Quickshort-v*-macos.dmg from Releases, open it, drag Quickshort into Applications.

Homebrew (custom tap):

brew tap truongnat/tap
brew install --cask quickshort

Unsigned build — no Developer ID signature or notarization. On first launch, right-click the app → Open → Open once. The cask strips quarantine automatically. The app is signed with a stable self-signed identity purely so macOS keeps your permission grants across updates.

Required permissions (System Settings → Privacy & Security):

• Screen Recording — needed to capture anything
• Accessibility — needed for the global hotkey

Updates — the app checks GitHub Releases once a day in the background; the tray item becomes Update to vX — Restart to Install. Or: tray menu → Check for Updates…, or brew upgrade --cask quickshort.

Optional: brew install ffmpeg enables screen recording (⌘R); without it everything else still works — Record fails with a visible toast.

Linux

AppImage — grab Quickshort-Linux.AppImage from Releases, chmod +x, run. Bundles the tray dependencies (gtk plugin).

Debian / Ubuntu — quickshort_amd64.deb installs to /usr/bin with a .desktop entry and icon:

sudo dpkg -i quickshort_amd64.deb

The deb pulls ffmpeg via Recommends (screen recording); AppImage users need it on PATH themselves — sudo apt install ffmpeg.

Or from source — ./install.sh installs missing system deps on Debian/Ubuntu (pipewire/spa/clang dev packages for the build, plus tesseract-ocr + language packs, wl-clipboard, libnotify-bin at runtime; extra OCR languages via QS_OCR_LANGS), builds release → ~/.local/bin and registers a GNOME custom shortcut via gsettings (default Ctrl+Alt+Q). On non-GNOME desktops it installs the binary only — bind it yourself.

Windows

Quickshort-Windows-Setup.exe under Releases — NSIS installer: Program Files install, Start Menu shortcut, uninstaller entry. Unsigned, so SmartScreen warns once (More info → Run anyway). Runs as a tray app, no console window. Or build from source (cargo build --release -p qs-app). The installer warns if ffmpeg.exe isn't on PATH (winget install ffmpeg) — it's only needed for ⌘R screen recording.

Usage

quickshort                              # resident tray app (default)
quickshort --capture                    # one-shot: select -> action -> exit
quickshort --capture --delay 2          # wait first (menus, tooltips)
quickshort --capture --out ~/shots/a.png
quickshort --capture-full               # save the whole screen, no selection

Context	Shortcut	Action
Anywhere	⌘⇧S macOS/Linux, PrintScreen Windows (configurable)	Start a selection
Anywhere	⌘⇧F (configurable, hotkey_full)	Save the whole screen — no overlay
Selection made	⌘S / ⌘C / ⌘T / ⌘L (rebindable)	Save / copy / OCR / share link → clipboard
Selection made	⌘G / ⌘R (rebindable)	Scrolling capture / record region to mp4
Selection made	⌘Z / ⌘⇧Z (rebindable key)	Undo / redo an edit
Block selected	Delete / ⌫ / Esc	Remove block / deselect
Text draft	Enter / Esc	Commit / discard
Text draft	⌘A, ⇧+arrows, ←→, ⌫/⌦	Select, move caret, delete
Selection made	Esc	Cancel

The tray menu offers Capture Region, Capture Full Screen, Recent Captures, Open Screenshots Folder, Check for Updates, Launch at Login, Settings and Quit. Settings also live in ~/.config/quickshort/config.toml:

hotkey = "CmdOrCtrl+Shift+S"   # global-hotkey syntax; "PrintScreen" is
                               # the Windows default — falls back to
                               # Ctrl+Shift+S if the shell owns it
hotkey_full = "CmdOrCtrl+Shift+F" # second chord: saves the whole screen;
                               # empty string disables it
# save_dir = "~/Pictures/quickshort"
launch_at_login = false
auto_update = true
recent_max = 8                 # entries in the tray menu
accent = "blue"                # blue/purple/pink/orange/green/gray
copy_after_save = false        # also put the PNG on the clipboard
ocr_lang = "auto"              # Linux tesseract: "auto" detects the
                               # script, or pin e.g. "eng+jpn"
keep_days = 0                  # auto-delete captures older than N days
key_save = "s"                 # overlay ⌘+key actions
key_copy = "c"
key_ocr = "t"
key_share = "l"
key_scroll = "g"               # scrolling capture
key_record = "r"               # screen recording (needs ffmpeg on PATH)
key_undo = "z"                 # ⌘z undo, ⌘⇧z redo
popup_pos = "top-right"        # toast/card/REC dock corner: top-left,
                               # top-center, top-right, bottom-* too

The selection toolbar docks to whichever edge of the region has room. Clicking away starts a new selection; Esc or a click without dragging cancels. Saved files go to ~/Pictures/quickshort/quickshort-<ts>.png.

How it works

capture every monitor into RAM
  → dimmed overlay windows (one per monitor)
  → selection in global virtual coordinates
  → map through each monitor's origin + DPI scale
  → stitch per-monitor crops on a worker thread

Crate	Role
qs-core	geometry + stitching, pure
qs-capture	per-OS backends behind ScreenCapture
qs-overlay	winit + softbuffer, SDF-drawn toolbar, annotation layers, text via embedded Inter (ab_glyph)
qs-ocr	native text extraction
qs-app	CLI + resident tray app (tray-icon/muda/global-hotkey), updates

Capture backends:

Platform	Backend
macOS 14+	SCScreenshotManager per-display one-shot at framebuffer pixels
Windows	GDI BitBlt per monitor, PER_MONITOR_AWARE_V2
GNOME Wayland	org.gnome.Mutter.ScreenCast → PipeWire shm frames, in-process
Other Wayland (KDE, wlroots)	org.freedesktop.portal.ScreenCast → PipeWire
X11	RandR layout + GetImage

On GNOME Wayland there is no portal dialog and no subprocess — the backend talks to mutter's private ScreenCast API (the same one the GNOME portal uses internally), then reads shared-memory buffers from PipeWire, one connection multiplexing all monitor streams. Other compositors go through xdg-desktop-portal: the compositor shows a consent dialog once, and on portals supporting persist_mode (KDE 5.24+) a stored restore token makes later captures dialog-free. QS_CAPTURE=portal|mutter|x11 forces a backend.

OCR on Linux runs the system tesseract binary: in auto mode an OSD pass detects the script and maps it to the installed language packs (missing packs fail loud with the exact apt package to install), and CJK output gets its artificial word spacing collapsed. Wayland capture pokes a 1x1 XWayland window mid-screen because mutter only produces frames on damage, and MemFd/DmaBuf buffers are mmap'ed directly.

Development

cargo test                                       # unit tests
cargo test -p qs-capture -- --ignored            # real capture (needs Wayland/macOS)
cargo run -p qs-app                              # resident app
cargo run -p qs-app -- --capture                 # one-shot

Release packaging: packaging/macos/release.sh runs the full pipeline — release build (universal when both rustup targets exist), Quickshort.app bundle, self-signed identity (packaging/macos/gen_signing_cert.sh), zip + dmg + sha256 into dist/. Tagging v* triggers the GitHub workflow, which does the same and publishes a GitHub Release.

Privacy

Everything runs locally — captures, OCR, settings never leave your machine. The only outbound traffic is a share upload you trigger (image lives 3 days on a Cloudflare Worker), an opt-in bug report (posted as a public GitHub issue), and a daily GitHub release check. No analytics, no accounts. Full policy: docs/privacy.html · quickshort site.

Support

Free and open source, built in spare time. If Quickshort saves you time:

• GitHub Sponsors — international, zero fees on personal sponsorships
• VietQR — MB Bank 0969069035 · ĐÀO QUANG TRƯỞNG (scan with any VN banking app)

Known limits

• Mutter inhibits screencast while the screen is locked
• Wayland needs one overlay window per monitor (no global window positioning); pointer grab carries the selection across monitors
• Wayland has no global hotkey API — the resident app registers through the compositor instead (GNOME custom keybinding, KDE GlobalShortcuts portal, swaymsg/hyprctl); other Wayland desktops: bind quickshort --capture as a custom shortcut. The tray needs an AppIndicator extension on GNOME
• Unsigned macOS builds: first launch needs one right-click → Open; the self-signed identity keeps TCC grants across updates but is not a Developer ID