SuperShot

A native GTK4/Libadwaita screenshot tool for Linux desktops, written in Rust.

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SuperShot provides a focused interface for taking screenshots, marking them up, and sharing them. Capture goes through the XDG Desktop Portal on both Wayland and X11, so it works on GNOME, KDE Plasma, and any compositor that ships a portal backend; where none is available it falls back to the command-line screenshot tools the session already has. Screenshots are saved and copied to the clipboard automatically.

Features

Annotate

• Annotation tools -- arrow, rectangle, ellipse, highlighter, free draw, text labels, and numbered step markers for walking a reader through a UI. Eight-colour palette and adjustable thickness that scales with the capture's resolution.
• Redaction -- pixelate and blackout tools that overwrite the underlying pixels rather than drawing over them, so nothing sensitive survives in the saved file. Blur is deliberately not offered here: it attenuates information rather than removing it, and is frequently reversible for text.
• Undo and redo across annotations, crops, and adjustments.
• Copy without saving -- Ctrl+C in the preview renders the annotated image straight to the clipboard, ready to paste into a chat or issue tracker.

Capture

• Capture modes -- ask, area, window, or the whole screen. Selectable in the interface and on the command line.
• Configurable delay -- none, 3, 5, or 10 seconds, with a visual countdown shown inside the capture button.
• Portal-first, everywhere -- the XDG Desktop Portal is tried on every backend. When no portal answers, SuperShot uses whichever tool the session provides: grim+slurp, spectacle, wayshot or hyprshot on Wayland; gnome-screenshot, xfce4-screenshooter, spectacle, scrot, maim, flameshot or ImageMagick's import on X11.
• Duplicate prevention -- the portal's own copy is removed after processing, so no duplicate appears in the system screenshot folder.

Edit

• Crop -- drag a selection with a live dimension badge, then click inside it or press Apply Crop.
• Image editor -- rotate, flip, brightness, contrast, blur, sharpen, grayscale, and invert, applied live in the preview before saving.
• Watermark -- optional text overlay rendered with Pango, with 5 date format presets, custom text, 4 corner positions, and white or black with a contrasting shadow. Rendered live in the preview exactly as it will be saved, timestamp included.

Output

• PNG or JPEG, with configurable JPEG quality.
• Custom save directory via folder picker, with one-click access to it.
• Automatic clipboard copy after each capture.
• Desktop notifications with actions to open the image or reveal it in the file manager.

General

• Settings persistence via GSettings.
• CLI headless mode for scripting and keyboard shortcuts.
• Session diagnostics -- supershot --doctor reports the display server, desktop, packaging channel, portal availability, and which fallback tools are installed. The same information is in the About dialog.
• 14 languages via GNU gettext.

Requirements

Runtime

Dependency	Minimum version	Notes
GTK 4	4.14
Libadwaita	1.5
An XDG Desktop Portal backend	--	xdg-desktop-portal-gnome, -kde, -wlr or -gtk

Without a portal backend, SuperShot falls back to any of grim+slurp, spectacle, wayshot, hyprshot, gnome-screenshot, xfce4-screenshooter, scrot, maim, flameshot, or ImageMagick's import. Run supershot --doctor to see what the running session offers.

Build

Tool	Version
Rust toolchain	1.92+ (edition 2021)
pkg-config	--
GTK 4 development headers	libgtk-4-dev
Libadwaita development headers	libadwaita-1-dev
GNU gettext	for msgfmt; without it the build is English-only

On Debian and Ubuntu:

sudo apt install libgtk-4-dev libadwaita-1-dev libglib2.0-dev pkg-config gettext

On Fedora:

sudo dnf install gtk4-devel libadwaita-devel glib2-devel pkgconf-pkg-config gettext

On Arch Linux:

sudo pacman -S gtk4 libadwaita glib2 pkgconf gettext

Building from source

git clone https://github.com/axpnet/supershot.git
cd supershot
cargo build --release

The release binary is produced at target/release/supershot.

During development build.rs compiles the GSettings schema and the translation catalogs into the target directory, so cargo run works without a system-wide installation step. Nothing is ever written into $HOME, where an outdated development schema could otherwise shadow an installed package's schema and crash the app at startup.

Installation

From Snap Store

sudo snap install supershot

From .deb package

Download the latest .deb for your architecture (amd64 or arm64) from the Releases page:

sudo apt install ./supershot_1.3.0_amd64.deb

Using apt rather than dpkg -i lets it resolve the runtime dependencies.

AppImage

For distributions whose GTK 4 or libadwaita is older than SuperShot needs, and for immutable systems:

chmod +x SuperShot-1.3.0-x86_64.AppImage
./SuperShot-1.3.0-x86_64.AppImage

From source

cargo build --release
sudo ./scripts/install.sh /
sudo glib-compile-schemas /usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas/
sudo update-desktop-database /usr/share/applications/

scripts/install.sh DESTDIR [PREFIX] is the same installer every packaging channel uses, so a manual install gets exactly what a package would: binary, desktop entry, GSettings schema, AppStream metadata, icons, man page, and all 14 translation catalogs.

Usage

GUI mode

supershot

Opens the main window with two tabs:

• Shot -- choose what to capture (ask, area, window, whole screen), the delay, and whether to open the preview. Press the circular button, or Ctrl+Enter.
• Settings -- watermark (enable, date format, custom text, position, colour), output format and JPEG quality, and the save directory.

With Preview enabled, the capture opens in the annotation window. The same window can be opened on an image already on disk:

supershot --edit ~/Pictures/Screenshots/shot.png

Tools live in a sidebar that collapses into an overlay on narrow windows:

Tool	What it does
Crop	Drag a region, then click inside it or press Apply Crop
Arrow, Box, Circle	Drag to draw
Marker	Translucent highlight over a region
Pen	Freehand drawing
Text	Type in the toolbar field, then click to place the label
Step	Click to drop the next numbered marker
Pixelate, Redact	Drag over sensitive data -- the pixels are destroyed, not covered

Shortcut	Action
Ctrl+S	Save
Ctrl+C	Copy the annotated image to the clipboard without saving
Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Shift+Z	Undo / redo
Escape	Cancel the pending selection

CLI headless mode

supershot --now --mode area --delay 3

Captures without showing the interface and prints the saved path to standard output, which makes it suitable for a desktop keyboard shortcut or a script.

Flag	Description	Default
-d, --delay	Seconds before capture	0
--now	Headless mode, no GUI	false
-m, --mode	interactive, area, window, screen	interactive
-f, --format	png, jpeg	png
--quality	JPEG quality, 1-100	90
-o, --output	Save directory	configured location
--watermark	Overlay the configured watermark	false
-e, --edit	Annotate an existing image instead of capturing
--doctor	Print session diagnostics and exit

Troubleshooting

supershot --doctor

Reports the display server GDK actually connected to, the desktop, the packaging channel, where translation catalogs were found, whether a screenshot portal is on the bus, and which fallback tools are installed. Include its output in bug reports.

Translations

SuperShot ships with 14 language translations via GNU gettext. The interface defaults to English; translations are activated automatically when the system locale matches a supported language.

Language	Code	Status
English	en	Source language
Italian	it	Complete
French	fr	Complete
German	de	Complete
Spanish	es	Complete
Portuguese	pt	Complete
Russian	ru	Complete
Polish	pl	Complete
Turkish	tr	Complete
Japanese	ja	Complete
Korean	ko	Complete
Chinese (Simplified)	zh_CN	Complete
Chinese (Traditional)	zh_TW	Complete
Hindi	hi	Complete
Indonesian	id	Complete

All 122 interface strings are translated in every language listed above.

To add or update a translation, run scripts/update-po.sh to refresh po/supershot.pot and merge it into every catalog, then edit po/<lang>.po. The script extracts both the gettext() calls in the Rust sources and the translatable="yes" attributes in the GtkBuilder template. CI fails if the template is out of date. See docs/CONTRIBUTING.md.

Architecture

SuperShot is a standard GLib/GTK4 application using the object-subclassing pattern with an inline composite template:

src/
  main.rs      Entry point, CLI parsing (clap), dispatch
  app.rs       AdwApplication subclass: lifecycle, actions, About, shortcuts
  config.rs    Identifiers, and runtime resolution of installation-dependent paths
  i18n.rs      GNU gettext initialization
  window.rs    Main window: tabbed UI (AdwViewStack), GSettings bindings
  capture.rs   Backend detection, portal and CLI capture, save pipeline, watermark
  preview.rs   Annotation and editing window
  annotate.rs  Annotation display list, Cairo rendering, redaction
  editing.rs   Non-destructive edit state and pixel operations

Capture. The XDG Desktop Portal (via ashpd) is tried first on every backend, parented to the SuperShot window so its dialog cannot open behind or unfocused. When no portal answers, a table of CLI tools is consulted, filtered by the backend GDK actually connected to and by which capture mode each tool supports -- read from GDK rather than from WAYLAND_DISPLAY, because GDK_BACKEND=x11 inside a Wayland session produces an X11 client whose environment still advertises Wayland.

Save pipeline. Everything after capture operates on a single owned image::RgbaImage, in this order: edits, crop, redactions (which overwrite pixels), vector annotations, watermark, encode. The whole pipeline is Send and runs on a worker thread. Watermark and annotation text are laid out by Pango and rendered into transparent Cairo layers that are composited onto the image, so shaping and font fallback work for every script.

Preview. Live editing runs against a copy of the image bounded to 1600 px on its longest edge, with debounced recomputation; saving re-runs the same edits at full resolution. The preview window owns the working image, which is what makes a crop and the adjustments layered on it both survive to disk.

Tests. cargo test covers the parts that cannot be checked by clicking through the interface: annotation coordinates across crops, rotations and flips; redaction destroying pixels rather than covering them; the Cairo and image conversions, including Cairo's premultiplied alpha and padded row stride; and save-directory resolution and fallback.

Paths. Locale catalogs are located at runtime from the executable's own prefix, with Flatpak, Snap and SUPERSHOT_LOCALEDIR taking precedence, so one binary works from /usr, /app, $SNAP or an AppImage mountpoint.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome. Please open an issue to discuss proposed changes before submitting a pull request. See docs/CONTRIBUTING.md for the development workflow and translation guide.

Support

If you find SuperShot useful, consider supporting its development:

• GitHub Sponsors: github.com/sponsors/axpnet
• Buy Me a Coffee: buymeacoffee.com/axpnet

License

This project is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 or later. See the LICENSE file for details.

Author

axpnet -- github.com/axpnet

Repository: https://github.com/axpnet/supershot