Terminal screenshots that actually look like your terminal

Select output in the VS Code terminal, run one command, get an SVG, HTML or PNG.

By default you get exactly what you were looking at. Your theme's colors, your terminal's font, your operating system's window frame. CLIsnap does not ship a single palette or font of its own, so nothing is invented and nothing needs configuring. Everything past that point is yours to change if you want to: any theme you have installed, any window frame, any size.

The same capture twice. On the left, VS Code Dark with a Windows frame. On the right, Catppuccin Macchiato with a macOS frame. Neither is a CLIsnap theme; both came from the editor.

Install

Search for CLIsnap in the Extensions view and click Install.

See CHANGELOG.md.

Capture and save

This is the everyday path. One command, one dialog, done.

1. Select the output you want in the integrated terminal.
2. Press Ctrl+Shift+P (⌘⇧P on macOS) and run CLIsnap: Capture and Save.
3. Pick where to save it.

Give it a shortcut

CLIsnap ships without one, on purpose (after several attempts to unify the shortcuts). Every combination worth having is already taken by the editor, the terminal or the desktop, and which ones are free differs between machines. Yours is the only keyboard that matters, so pick the key yourself:

1. Press Ctrl+K Ctrl+S (⌘K ⌘S on macOS) to open Keyboard Shortcuts.
2. Search for CLIsnap. All three commands are listed.
3. Click the one you want, press your key, and press Enter.

The editor tells you if the key already does something else, so you find out before it costs you a shortcut you rely on rather than after.

Note

With Settings Sync turned on in VS Code, the shortcut you set follows you to your other machines, including ones running a different operating system.

Capture and adjust

When you want a different theme or frame on a particular shot:

1. Select the output.
2. Press Ctrl+Shift+P (⌘⇧P on macOS) and run CLIsnap: Capture and Preview.
3. Change the theme, window frame or text size and watch the preview update.
4. Save as SVG, PNG or HTML, or copy the plain text.

Whatever you change here is remembered, so your next capture uses it. Reset puts everything back to how the capture was taken.

Capturing long output

Scroll back and select as far as you want. CLIsnap captures the whole selection, not only the part on screen.

Important

The limit is your terminal's own scrollback, not CLIsnap. VS Code keeps 1000 lines by default, and anything older is already gone before you can select it. If you capture long logs, raise terminal.integrated.scrollback.

Rendering a file

Some output is too long to select. A terminal only keeps the last 1000 lines by default, so anything older is gone before you can reach it. Send it to a file instead, and render the file.

1. Run your command, pointing its output at a file. Any command, any shell:

   git log --oneline --graph -n 5000 > history.log

2. In VS Code, press Ctrl+Shift+P (⌘⇧P on macOS) and run CLIsnap: Render a Text File.

3. Pick the file.

From there it behaves exactly like a terminal capture: same themes, same frames, same three formats.

Color is not read from the file yet. Escape codes in a log written with --color=always are stripped rather than shown, so you get clean text without control characters in it. Tabs are expanded to eight columns so tables still line up.

Note

Progress bars read oddly. A tool that redraws a line in place writes every frame to the file, and CLIsnap does not replay the overwrites, so those frames end up next to each other on one line.

Settings

Setting	Default	What it does
clisnap.format	svg	Format that Capture and Save writes
clisnap.frame	auto	Window frame. auto follows your operating system
clisnap.fontSize	14	Text size of the output, in pixels
clisnap.theme	(empty)	Theme to render with. Empty means whichever theme is active

Output formats

SVG is the default and the one to reach for. It stays sharp at any size, and the text is real text, so you can open it in Inkscape or Illustrator and edit the words or recolor a line. Columns are pinned to their exact width, so tables and box drawing stay aligned even on a machine without your font.

HTML gives you a single self-contained file. The text stays live, so readers can select it, search it, or hear it read out by a screen reader.

PNG is rendered at 2x so it stays crisp on a high resolution display. Use it when whatever you are pasting into will not take anything else.

Note

Setting clisnap.format to png makes Capture and Save open the preview panel first, because turning the image into pixels needs a canvas to draw on.

Themes

The theme list is every color theme installed in your editor, not a set of themes bundled with CLIsnap. Pick any of them and the capture is recolored, so ANSI red becomes that theme's red.

Colors a program picked for itself, meaning 256 color and 24 bit values, are left exactly as they were. Those were never the theme's to change.

Your active theme is marked · captured in the list.

Window frames

The frame around the output matches the operating system the shell is running on, so a Windows capture gets Windows caption buttons rather than macOS dots. Pick a different one in the preview, or turn the frame off entirely. The title is your terminal's own name, such as pwsh, bash or zsh.

What gets captured

What	How it comes out
Color	16 color ANSI, 256 color and 24 bit, exactly as rendered
Attributes	bold, dim, italic, underline, strikethrough, reverse video
Layout	box drawing, tables and ASCII art keep their alignment
Wide characters	CJK and emoji take two cells, the same as in the terminal
Font	whatever your terminal was rendering with

Requirements

VS Code 1.93 or later.

Important

On Linux you must install a clipboard tool. A stock Ubuntu desktop ships none, and capture cannot work without one.

sudo apt install xclip          # X11
sudo apt install wl-clipboard   # Wayland

This is needed on the machine running VS Code, not on a remote you are connected to.

Works in Remote-SSH, WSL and container windows. The capture reads your local clipboard and saves to your local filesystem, while the frame and title follow the machine the shell is on.

Footprint

A 37 KB download, 81 KB installed, of which the extension itself is 43 KB and the icon 13 KB. No dependencies, no bundled runtime, no background process, no network access, nothing phoning home.

Rendering happens in the extension itself. SVG and HTML are text, so they are written straight out; PNG borrows the editor's own canvas to turn one into pixels. Nothing is uploaded and nothing is tunneled anywhere.

Known limits

Integrated terminal only. Capture uses VS Code's own terminal, so a separate terminal application cannot be captured.

Nothing selected means nothing captured. CLIsnap tells you rather than quietly saving whatever happened to be on your clipboard.

PNG has a length limit that SVG and HTML do not. Past a few thousand lines the canvas it draws on runs out of room. Save long captures as SVG or HTML.

Long captures make large files. 50,000 lines renders in under a second but produces roughly a 15 MB SVG, which is slow to open. HTML is about a third the size.

Acknowledgements

Somewhat inspired by termsnap by @kushakjafry.