Screenshots

Capture a pane, a region or the whole screen as a styled PNG, SVG, HTML or text file.

TUIOS renders screenshots from the pane's own cells, not from pixels on your screen. Colours, bold, italics and links are exact, and it works over SSH, in the browser, and on a detached session. A PNG or SVG gets a frame: padding, a background derived from the theme, rounded corners, a shadow and a title bar.

In the app

How	What it captures
Ctrl+B C	Enter capture mode, then pick a pane
Palette: Screenshot this window	The focused pane, at once
Palette: Screenshot a region	Enter capture mode and drag over the area you want
Palette: Screenshot the screen	The whole screen: panes, rail and dock
Right-click a pane: Screenshot this window	That pane

In capture mode:

Key	Action
Tab, arrows, hjkl	Move between panes
Enter or Space	Capture the highlighted pane
Mouse drag	Capture a region
f	Capture the full screen
Esc, q	Cancel

After a capture a preview panel opens (screenshot.preview). On a terminal with kitty graphics it shows the framed image. Elsewhere it shows the cells.

Key	Action
Enter, q	Keep the file and close
Esc	Delete the file and close
c	Copy the image to the clipboard
o	Open the file
r	Retake
Arrows, PgUp/PgDn, Home	Scroll the preview

Files are saved under screenshot.directory, which defaults to ~/Pictures/tuios.

The action names screenshot_window and screenshot_screen have no default key. Bind them in [keybindings] if you want one-key captures.

From the command line

tuios screenshot asks the daemon to render a pane, so nobody needs to be attached.

# The focused pane, as a PNG in screenshot.directory
tuios screenshot

# A named pane in a named session
tuios screenshot -s work -w build

# Include the last 200 lines of history above the screen
tuios screenshot --scrollback --lines 200

# An SVG for a README
tuios screenshot --format svg --out demo.svg

# Render in a different theme
tuios screenshot --theme catppuccin_mocha

Flag	Meaning
-s, --session	Target session
-w, --window	Target pane, by name or id
-f, --format	png, svg, html, ansi or txt
--frame	window, plain or none
--theme	Render in this theme instead of the session's
-o, --out	Output path instead of a generated name
-S, --scrollback	Put the pane's history above the screen
--lines	Limit the history to the last N rows
--cursor	Draw the cursor
--copy, --no-copy	Copy to the clipboard, or do not
--json	Print the result as JSON: path, format, cols, rows, bytes, copied, warnings

A tape can take a screenshot too, with the Screenshot command. It renders the focused pane.

Formats

Format	What you get
png	An image with the frame. screenshot.scale sets the pixel density
svg	A vector image with the frame. Text stays text
html	A page with the styled cells
ansi	The pane as text with colour escape codes, no frame
txt	Plain text, no frame

Note

Set a theme for exact colours

With no theme set, TUIOS does not know your terminal's palette, so the 16 basic colours fall back to the xterm defaults and the result says so. Set appearance.theme, or pass --theme, to render in a known palette.

The frame

Every part of the frame is a [screenshot] option. --frame, --format, --cursor and --copy/--no-copy override the matching option for one capture.

[screenshot]
format = "png"
directory = "~/Pictures/tuios"
frame = "window"         # window, plain or none
background = "auto"      # auto, none, #rrggbb, or #rrggbb..#rrggbb for a gradient
padding = 48             # pixels, 0 to 128
radius = 10              # corner radius, 0 to 32
shadow = true
controls = "auto"        # auto, macos, glyphs or none
title_format = "{title}" # {title}, {index}, {cwd}
scale = 2                # PNG size multiplier, 1 to 4
copy = true
preview = true

To draw text in a particular font, set font_family, or font_file to a font file. font_file is used for PNG and embedded in SVG and HTML. The full table is in Configuration.

Related

• Themes and Appearance: Pick the palette a capture renders in
• Configuration: Every screenshot option
• CLI Reference: capture-pane for text, screenshot for pictures
• Tape Recording: Record a session as a replayable tape