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Capto overview

Capto is an ultra-light, purely local screen recorder for Windows 10+, written as a clean-room spiritual successor to Captura. It records display, window, or region to MP4 (NVENC/QSV/AMF/libx264) or GIF, with mouse-click and keystroke overlays, webcam picture-in-picture, global hotkeys, and a full agent-facing CLI. Files stay on your machine: there are no upload SDKs, no accounts, and no cloud features in product code.

The project is a Rust + TypeScript monorepo. The desktop app is a Tauri 2 shell (apps/desktop) whose React UI sends intents over Tauri commands; all frame processing happens in Rust crates under crates/. The capto CLI (crates/capto-cli) controls the running desktop over a localhost HTTP control plane rather than owning its own recording pipeline, which guarantees one recording session per machine. Two npm packages (packages/capto-agent-skill, packages/capto-dsh-plugin) let AI agents drive the same CLI.

The wiki maps to the codebase as follows:

Architecture, the recording pipeline, session state machine, and control plane
Getting started, prerequisites, setup, build, test, run
Glossary, project vocabulary
Apps, desktop app, CLI, website, updater mirror worker
Crates, the Rust workspace packages
Packages, the npm agent packages
Features, recording, overlays, audio, webcam PiP, hotkeys, updates
Control-plane API, the localhost HTTP contract agents talk to
Deployment, CI, release, and hosting pipelines
Security, trust boundaries and privacy controls
How to contribute, working in this repo

Key facts

Version 1.0.0 (stable), MIT license, Windows first (macOS/Linux capture backends are stubs)
Stack: Tauri 2, Rust (workspace of 9 crates), React 19 + TypeScript + Vite, FFmpeg sidecar from elwina/capto-ffmpeg
Encoding goes only through the bundled FFmpeg sidecar, never a system/PATH FFmpeg
One RecordingSession per machine, owned by the desktop process; the CLI is a client, not a second recorder
Repo hygiene gates (scripts/scan-tech-debt.ps1 and friends) keep the source free of TODO/FIXME markers and oversized files

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