winshotx documentation

Install

Download the installer and run it. It weighs 2.54 MB, installs for your user only and never shows the administrator prompt. It needs Windows 10 version 1903 or newer.

It lives in the system tray with no window of its own. Windows hides new tray icons, so if you cannot see it, look behind the ^ arrow on the taskbar.

It updates itself. When a new version is out, a button shows up in Ajustes → Actualizaciones, and one click downloads it, installs it and restarts the app. Every download is signed and the signature is checked before anything is installed, so a tampered file is rejected.

The first time it opens on its own with four steps: the shortcuts, how you prefer to capture, whether the Impr Pant key should open winshotx instead of the Snipping Tool, and whether it should start with Windows. You can see it again in Ajustes → Sistema → Bienvenida.

Capture a region

Press Ctrl+Shift+2. The screen freezes and you drag over what you want. It is a frozen screenshot, not a transparent window, which is why the magnifier is exact to the pixel and nothing flickers underneath.

• Snapping to windows. Move the cursor without dragging and the window underneath lights up; one click takes it whole, with its real coordinates.
• Magnifier. While there is no selection, a 6× loupe follows the cursor and shows the hex code of the pixel underneath. That is the fastest way to pull a colour off the screen.
• Fine tuning. The arrow keys move the selection one pixel at a time, Shift moves it ten, and Alt resizes instead of moving.
• Several monitors. Every screen freezes at once, each at its own scaling, and a 100 × 100 selection produces a 100 × 100 file in real pixels.

What happens when you let go depends on the profile picked in Ajustes → Captura, and both use the same shortcut and the same selection.

• Sale la barra. A small toolbar appears over the selection: copy, save, open in the editor, record as GIF, record as video, or cancel with Esc. It is the complete one.
• Se copia sola. Nothing appears: you let go of the mouse and the image is already in the clipboard, ready to paste. A single click on a window copies it whole.

The recording shortcut always shows the toolbar, whichever profile is set: it has to ask whether you want a GIF or a video.

Record

Press Ctrl+Shift+5, drag over the area and press the same shortcut again to stop. While it records you see a thin frame around the region and a small bar with the timer.

It records through Windows Graphics Capture at 15, 30 or 60 fps, so no overlay leaks into the video and the cost to the processor is close to nothing. Every frame is written to a lossless cache on disk, which is what makes the frame by frame editing possible afterwards.

It records sound too: the system audio (whatever the speakers are playing) and your microphone, mixed into the same track. Each has its own switch in Settings and either can go alone. Exporting at a speed other than 1× comes out silent, and the panel says so beforehand: stretching a track without touching its pitch is another problem entirely.

The last few seconds. With the ring on, winshotx records all the time and drops the old, so Ctrl+Shift+6 keeps the last 15, 30 or 60 seconds without having pressed record beforehand. You pick the screen, the quality and the smoothness, and it tells you up front how much disk it can take. Saving does not stop the recording.

The editor

When the recording stops, the editor opens with the whole clip. It is not a timeline with effects: it is the frames, one by one, so you can throw away what you do not want.

• Thumbnail strip. Every frame with its number and its time. Click one to jump there.
• A and B trim. I marks the start and O marks the end. What falls outside is dimmed and does not reach the file.
• Looped playback. Space plays and pauses; the arrows step one frame at a time.
• Scale. Width and height are chained by default, so the proportion never breaks. There are 100, 75 and 50 percent buttons.
• Zoom on every click. The camera moves in on each click of the recording, and how much you decide after recording: the clicks were written down while it recorded, so raising it, lowering it or dropping it never means recording again.
• Rings, keys and cursor. A ring where you pressed, a badge with the shortcut you just typed (only shortcuts with a modifier, never a lone key: a password has no Ctrl in front) and the pointer drawn at the size you ask for.
• Frame and background. Air around the capture, with a shadow and a background to choose, for when the shot goes into a slide or a post.
• Speed. 0.5×, 2× or 4× over what you recorded. A tutorial has stretches where nothing happens.
• Six marks to annotate. Arrow, rectangle, text, highlight, numbered step and a mosaic that destroys private data. They go on the video too, not only on a still.

Export

Four formats: PNG and JPG for a still, GIF for something that loops in a chat, and MP4 for anything longer. The panel shows the estimated size before writing anything.

Save writes the file to disk. Copy puts it on the clipboard: a still goes as an image, and a GIF or an MP4 go two ways at once, as a file and as their written path. Where files can be dropped (Slack, Discord, File Explorer) the video is pasted; in any text box, its path.

If you happen to have ffmpeg on your PATH, the panel offers a maximum quality engine as well. It is never downloaded and never shipped: without it, everything above still works.

Shortcuts

Inside the editor: space plays, I and O mark the trim, C crops the image, the arrows step through frames, Ctrl+S exports with whatever the panel has set, and Esc closes.

And to annotate, six marks: 1 arrow, 2 box, 3 text, 4 highlight, 5 numbered step and 6 hide details. Ctrl+Z undoes the last one, and the steps number themselves.

Settings

Right click the tray icon: winshotx draws its own menu there, with the ring switch and every shortcut written next to what it does. From there, Settings. The two global shortcuts are changed by clicking the field and typing the new combination; if another application already holds it, the field turns red and says so.

Under them there is a switch that hands the Impr Pant key over from the Snipping Tool, and it says whether Windows actually let go of it.

It is four tabs, with nothing hidden three levels deep:

• Capture. The shortcut, how long it waits before capturing (none, 3 or 5 seconds), hiding the desktop icons while the shot lasts, the cursor, the magnifier, what happens when you let go of the mouse, and whether saving also copies.
• Record. The shortcut, the frame rate, system audio and microphone, opening the editor when it ends, and the whole last few seconds ring: how much it keeps, which screen, quality and smoothness.
• Windows keys. Taking Impr Pant and Win+Shift+S away from the Snipping Tool, and removing the Snipping Tool if you want it gone for good.
• The app. Destination folder, recording cache, theme (automatic, light or dark), language (automatic, Spanish or English), the welcome screen, a six stop tour of the settings, and starting with Windows.

Every row explains itself: leave the pointer on the icon beside its name and a bubble says what it does and when it is worth turning on. And a bar at the bottom, there in all four tabs, holds what gets touched often: theme, language, what happens on release, the tour, and updates, which when you are up to date is a green tick and nothing more.

You can click through all of it in the demo on the home page, without installing anything.

Questions people actually ask

How do I record a GIF of my screen on Windows?

Press Ctrl+Shift+5, drag over the area, and press it again to stop. The editor opens with every frame and the export panel writes the GIF. There is no FFmpeg to install.

Is this a free alternative to the Snipping Tool?

Yes, MIT licensed and open source. Measured on the same machine it shows the selection already painted 114 ms after the shortcut with three screens (the one under the mouse; the other two by 233 ms), against the Windows one's 920 ms; and it uses 33 MB against 253 MB. The Windows one still wins at coming preinstalled, at blurring personal data on its own and at speaking every language Windows speaks, and the comparison on the home page says so, point by point.

Does it upload my screenshots anywhere?

No. No account, no telemetry, no uploads. The only network call is checking GitHub for a new version, and it can be turned off.

Can I change the keyboard shortcut?

Yes, in Ajustes. Click the field and press the combination you want.

Can I capture with the Print Screen key?

Yes. In Settings → Windows keys a switch takes that key from the Snipping Tool and gives it to winshotx, and the app asks the first time you open it. It turns off the Windows setting that hands the key over, and turning the switch back off leaves it exactly as it was. Win+Shift+S is a different story: Windows attends that one before any program does and does not hand it to anybody, so it stays as it is.

How do I stop Win+Shift+S from opening the Snipping Tool?

With the Quedarme con Win+Mayús+S switch, in Settings → Windows keys. That key is attended by Windows before any program sees it, so no shortcut, keyboard hook or system policy can take it; the only thing that works is turning the S off in the Windows key shortcuts. It has a price and the switch says so before you flip it: that list goes by letter rather than by combination, so it takes Win+S, the search, with it. It does not apply until you sign out and back in, and turning it off puts everything back. It is a separate switch on purpose: freeing Impr Pant costs nothing, and nobody should lose their search as a side effect of that.

How do I paste a GIF into Slack or Discord?

Use Copy in the export panel. A still goes to the clipboard as an image, and a GIF or an MP4 go as a file and as their written path at the same time: they paste straight into Slack, Discord or File Explorer, and into any text box the path comes out instead.

Does it need administrator rights?

No. It installs for your user only, so the administrator prompt never shows up.

Does it work on macOS or Linux?

Not yet. The code compiles on both, but every platform specific function is behind a Windows guard with a stub for the rest, so porting means filling those stubs in. Capture, recording, MP4 encoding, clipboard and autostart are the ones that matter.