Snipdeck docs
Snips stay on screen as floating windows, their text is recognised on your device, and they are kept in a searchable gallery.
Windows, MIT, beta
First steps
- Introduction
What Snipdeck is, which platforms it runs on, the principles behind it, its headline capabilities, and how this guide is organized.
- Installation
Install Snipdeck as a portable .exe on Windows, or on Linux as a .deb, an .rpm or with install.sh; the GNOME extension, KDE Plasma, sway and Hyprland, building from source, and launch at login.
- Quick start
Take your first snip on Windows or Linux and learn what happens to it, from the floating window to the gallery.
- Capture shortcuts
The Snipdeck capture model: Win + drag on Windows, Super + Alt + drag on GNOME, the modifier matrix, freeze-first capture, and the global hotkeys.
What you can do
- Floating snips
- Work with floating snips: borderless windows you can move, resize, crop, rotate, hide and delete. How they behave on Windows, on GNOME and on other Linux desktops.
- Annotation editor
- Mark up any snip with pen, highlighter, shapes, arrows and text, using an HSV colour wheel, per-tool size and opacity, zoom, and undo/redo.
- Collage editor
- Combine several snips into one image: grid, justified rows or masonry, with column count, gap, rounded corners and background. The saved collage becomes a new snip in the gallery.
- OCR (text recognition)
- Snipdeck reads the text in every snip on your computer: with Windows.Media.Ocr on Windows and Tesseract on Linux. The text feeds gallery search and copies with one click.
- OCR + Translate
- Read the text in a snip in another language: the text is recognized on your computer, only that text goes to Google Translate with your consent, and the translation appears beside the snip.
- Gallery and search
- Browse every snip in the gallery, search OCR text and window details, filter by status, content, size and date, sort, and pick a card size.
- Sharing and export
- Every way to get a snip out of Snipdeck: copy, save, the Windows share sheet, email, the system image editor, and upload to catbox.moe, Imgur or your own server.
If something goes wrong
- Global shortcuts do nothing (Linux)
- Super+Alt+drag does nothing, or snips open in the wrong place (GNOME)
- Snips do not stay on top, and there is no drag gesture (other Linux desktops)
- No tray icon (GNOME)
- A screen-sharing dialog appears when you snip (Linux, Wayland)
- Email, the image editor or Open link do nothing (Linux)
- Win+drag does not trigger the first time (Windows)
- Win+drag does not work over an administrator window (Windows)
- A snip is black or blank (Windows)
- Your antivirus or SmartScreen warns about Snipdeck (Windows)
- OCR finds no text
- OCR + Translate fails
- An upload fails
- Your settings were reset
The whole troubleshooting page Frequently asked questions Report a bug: GitHub Issues Write to: [email protected]
Reference
- Keyboard and mouse shortcutsA reference of Snipdeck shortcuts grouped by where you use them: capture on Windows and Linux, the global hotkeys, the gallery, and the editors.
- Privacy and securityWhat Snipdeck keeps on your machine on Windows and Linux, the two features that use the network and how they ask first, and how it starts at login.
- SettingsWhat you change from Snipdeck's ⋯ menu, where it keeps its settings and data on Windows and Linux, and the settings.json keys you can edit by hand.
- Languages and localizationHow Snipdeck localizes into 23 languages from one gettext .po per language, and how to add or update a translation.
- Architecture (for contributors)How Snipdeck is built: the single-threaded Slint event loop and the pump that lets it sleep, worker threads and channels, the module map for Windows and Linux, the renderers, and the GNOME extension.