Floating snips

A floating snip is a captured region kept on screen as a borderless window. It keeps a reference in view while you work in another window. This page covers what you can do with a floating snip: move it, resize it, crop it, rotate and flip it, hide it and delete it. It also explains how snips behave on Windows, on GNOME and on other Linux desktops.

What a floating snip is

When you capture a region as a floating snip, Snipdeck opens the result in its own window with no title bar. On Windows you capture with Win + drag, on GNOME with Super+Alt + drag; the gallery’s New button and the global hotkeys work on every desktop. All the options are on the Capture shortcuts page.

The window holds only the captured pixels inside a thin, three-band border. The outer band is dark and the inner band white, so the border stays visible against light and dark backgrounds.

Each floating snip is an independent window. You can have many on screen at once, and each one is also a card in the gallery. Closing a floating window does not delete the snip from the gallery; it only takes it off the screen.

Behaviour by platform

Where a floating snip opens, and whether it stays above other windows, depends on your desktop.

On Wayland an application cannot position its own windows or ask to be kept above others; the compositor decides both. On GNOME the [email protected] shell extension, installed together with Snipdeck, closes that gap. It runs inside GNOME Shell: it places Snipdeck’s snip windows where they were captured, keeps them above other windows, sticks them to every workspace and keeps them out of the window lists. Without the extension, Snipdeck behaves on GNOME as it does on other Wayland desktops. See Installation for setup.

The selection highlight

Click a floating snip to select it. The middle band of the selected snip’s border turns from orange to blue while every other snip stays orange, so you can tell which one is selected when several are stacked on the desktop.

As soon as you switch to another window, the highlight clears and every snip falls back to its default border. A newly opened snip is not selected automatically; selection always follows your click.

Moving a snip

Press and drag anywhere on the image to move the window. The cursor shows the move icon over the snip.

How the last position is kept depends on the platform:

• On Windows Snipdeck records where you drag it. When the snip opens again, it returns to where you last left it rather than to where it was captured.
• On Wayland (GNOME included) the compositor performs the drag and never tells the app where the window landed. A snip you drag therefore does not keep its position across restarts. On GNOME it opens where it was captured the next time.

The first time you drag a snip, the handles on its border are hidden (see below). A moved snip is a free-floating note that no longer sits over the spot it was captured from.

Resizing

While a snip still sits over the spot it was captured from, its border shows eight handles: four corners and four edge midpoints. Drag any of them to make the snip larger or smaller.

Resizing does not take a new capture. The snip’s image stays the same and is scaled to fit the new window size. Snipdeck saves the new size, and the snip opens at that size next time. The handles stop at a minimum size, so you cannot shrink a snip to nothing by accident.

To get the handles back on a snip you have moved, right-click it and choose Resize (hint: handles).

Cropping

Cropping trims a snip down to part of the pixels it already contains.

Right-click the snip and choose Crop (hint: drag inward). Snipdeck sets the window to a 1:1 view of the image and turns the eight handles into inward-only crop handles. The border turns green while you are in crop mode. As you drag a handle inward, the window shrinks and shows exactly the region you are keeping. When you release, the crop is applied to the image’s real pixels.

If you right-click a gallery card and choose Crop while the snip is not on screen, Snipdeck opens it as a floating window first.

Rotating and flipping

Right-click the snip; the Transform row of the menu has five buttons. All of them act on the image’s real pixels:

Each transform rewrites the snip’s image, so the change persists in the gallery and in anything you export afterwards. If the snip is open in the annotation editor, Snipdeck does not start a rotate, flip or crop; it asks you to finish or cancel the annotation first.

Pinned snips

A pinned snip is one you want kept when you clear the gallery in bulk. A small gold dot in the top-right corner marks a pinned floating window.

You pin a snip from the gallery: hover its card and click the pin button. Pinning decides which snips a bulk clear deletes. Both actions are in the gallery’s ⋯ menu and ask for confirmation before deleting:

You can filter the gallery by pinned or unpinned and sort pinned snips first; see Gallery and search.

Hiding versus deleting

These two actions look similar but do different things:

• Hide from screen (right-click, hint: hide) closes the floating window and keeps the snip in the gallery. Click its card in the gallery to bring it back on screen.
• Delete (right-click, hint: remove) closes the window and removes the snip from the gallery, along with its image file and thumbnail. This is permanent.

To take a floating snip off the screen without opening the menu, middle-click it. This also keeps the snip in the gallery.

Hiding and showing all snips

The eye button in the gallery toolbar hides every on-screen snip at once; a second click reopens the same snips. The Win+Alt+H hotkey does the same (Super+Alt+H on Linux). On Wayland the desktop owns global shortcuts, so you change this one in your desktop’s keyboard settings. See Keyboard and mouse shortcuts for details.

Snips you leave on screen reopen the next time you start Snipdeck.

Floating snips in the taskbar

By default floating snips stay out of the window lists:

• On Windows they are not in the taskbar or the Alt+Tab list.
• On GNOME the extension keeps them out of Alt+Tab, the Activities overview and the dock. While only snips are open, Snipdeck does not show as a running app in the dock.

To change this, open the gallery’s ⋯ menu and check Floating snips in the taskbar. Snipdeck closes and reopens every snip currently on screen so the new windows pick up the setting, then saves your choice. On other Wayland desktops the option has no effect; there, snips are always listed like ordinary windows.

The setting is stored in settings.json under the floating_in_taskbar key (default false):

{
  "floating_in_taskbar": false
}

See Settings for the full list of configuration keys.

See also

• Capture shortcuts: the key combinations that decide what happens to each capture
• Gallery and search: find, filter and manage every snip
• Annotation editor: draw and write on a snip
• Settings: floating_in_taskbar and other keys