XenSnip is a Windows screenshot tool built for fast capture, clean annotation, and polished export.
It lives in the system tray, captures regions or the active window with global hotkeys, opens a quick-access editor, and lets you turn raw screenshots into presentation-ready visuals without leaving your desktop workflow.
Current release: 0.1.1
- Capture a screen region or the active window
- Open a quick-access editor immediately after capture
- Annotate screenshots with arrows, rectangles, text, callouts, steps, and freehand arrows
- Hide sensitive information with blur, pixelate, or opaque redact tools
- Style screenshots with gradients, wallpaper backgrounds, padding, borders, and shadows
- Copy the final result to the clipboard or export it to disk
- Reuse and manage visual presets across captures
- Extract text from a selected area with OCR
For normal use, download the latest Windows installer from GitHub Releases:
- Release page:
https://github.com/BiViPi/xensnip/releases - Landing page:
https://xensnip-landing-page.vercel.app/
The 0.1.1 release is intended to be distributed as an installer build rather than as a source-only package.
- Windows 10 (build
19041+) or Windows 11 - WebView2 runtime
Windows 11 normally includes WebView2 already. On Windows 10, the Tauri installer can install it as part of setup if it is missing.
| Action | Shortcut |
|---|---|
| Region capture | Ctrl+Shift+S |
| Active window capture | Ctrl+Alt+W |
Both shortcuts can be changed in the Settings window.
- Launch XenSnip and leave it running in the system tray.
- Trigger a capture with a hotkey or from the tray menu.
- Review the capture in the quick-access editor.
- Annotate, redact, and style the screenshot as needed.
- Copy or export the final image.
XenSnip includes OCR text extraction for selected regions.
Important notes:
- OCR runs locally through
Tesseract.js - On first use in a session, the OCR model is downloaded from
cdn.jsdelivr.net - Screenshot content is not uploaded to a remote OCR service
- OCR accuracy depends on font size, contrast, scaling, and language
- Captures stay in memory unless you explicitly export or save them
- Settings are stored locally at
%APPDATA%\XenSnip\settings.json - Logs are stored at
%APPDATA%\XenSnip\logs\ - XenSnip does not include analytics or telemetry
- Node.js
20+ - Rust stable
- Visual Studio C++ Build Tools for Tauri on Windows
pnpm install
pnpm run tauri devpnpm install
pnpm run tauri buildWindows bundle artifacts are generated under:
src-tauri/target/release/bundle/
Before cutting a release, run:
pnpm test
pnpm run lint
pnpm run build
cargo test --manifest-path src-tauri/Cargo.toml
cargo fmt --check --manifest-path src-tauri/Cargo.toml- Some protected or hardware-accelerated windows may capture as black or empty due to Windows restrictions
- OCR is best-effort and should not be treated as a guaranteed extraction layer
- XenSnip is currently Windows-only
Reset settings:
- Delete or rename
%APPDATA%\XenSnip\settings.json
Full uninstall:
- Uninstall XenSnip from Windows Settings
- Delete
%APPDATA%\XenSnip\if you also want to remove settings and logs
MIT. See LICENSE.