Most snipping tools stop at a screenshot. Unisic is everything that should happen after.
Silent capture · Annotate · Smart eraser · Record GIF/MP4/WebM · Upload · Zero telemetry · GPLv3
Most screenshot tools hand you a rectangle of pixels and walk away. Unisic covers the whole workflow after you press the hotkey: draw on the selection before the shot is even taken, polish it in the editor (blur, numbered steps, crop, smart eraser), record the same region as a GIF or video, and send the result where it belongs - clipboard, disk, or your own upload destination with the link ready to paste.
Built for Linux Wayland on legitimate APIs only (xdg-desktop-portal, KWin ScreenShot2, PipeWire). KDE Plasma gets the fully silent native path; GNOME and wlroots desktops work through portals - see compositor support. An X11 session works too, with the caveats in X11 support. C++20 · Qt 6 · QML, fully custom UI.
- Capture - full screen (all monitors), an interactive region with live dimensions, or the active window; configurable delay, optional cursor.
- Annotate before the shot - the selection overlay is a canvas: arrows, shapes, text, blur and numbered steps on the frozen screen; Enter burns them into the crop.
- Post-capture editor - opens automatically if you want it: 12 tools including highlight, pixelate, smart eraser and crop, with undo/redo and zoom.
- Record GIF & video - region, full screen or window → GIF, MP4 or WebM, with optional system and microphone audio. Ctrl+Esc always stops.
- Extract text & codes - OCR any region to copy its text, or point it at a QR/barcode to copy the payload.
- Upload anywhere - custom HTTP destinations, ShareX
.sxcuimport, FTP/SFTP, built-in hosts (catbox, Imgur…); the link auto-copies. - History - every capture in a thumbnail grid; deleting moves the file to the trash.
- Tray, hotkeys & 9 themes - quick-menu tray icon, fully rebindable global hotkeys, nine palettes including one that follows your system light/dark scheme and accent color.
- Languages - English, Polish, Spanish, Italian and French; follows your system locale or pick one in Settings.
Unisic is Wayland-first, but it runs on an X11 session as well. Screenshots, the overlay, the editor, OCR, history and uploads are session-agnostic and always worked there. Since 0.8 the two paths that did not now do:
- Screen recording grabs frames from the X server with XShm instead of the ScreenCast portal, so recording also works on desktops that ship no portal backend at all (Cinnamon, MATE, XFCE on Xorg). Cursor, click ripples and the keystroke badge come along; the record-region frame and the styled notification card are drawn as override-redirect windows.
- Global hotkeys use
XGrabKeyon desktops without KGlobalAccel, so they no longer depend on the GlobalShortcuts portal.
One source stays unavailable on X11: recording a single window needs the portal's window picker. Record the full screen or a region instead.
Please treat X11 as a best-effort second target. Development and daily use happen on Wayland, so X11 does not get continuous testing - it was verified by walking through the features once, on one desktop, not by living in it. Regressions there will not be noticed on their own, so if something breaks file an issue with your desktop and window manager.
The quickest way is the guided installer. Paste this into a terminal:
bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/unisic/unisic/main/scripts/install.sh)"It runs straight from memory - the script is never saved to your disk, it just executes in the terminal - and opens an arrow-key menu that detects your distro and installs the matching package (.deb / Fedora .rpm / Arch .pkg.tar.zst, the openSUSE repo, or a self-updating AppImage / portable .tar.gz on immutable and other systems). The same menu also updates, uninstalls, installs an older version, and toggles automatic updates. Nothing is installed until you pick it from the menu.
Prefer to do it by hand? Grab a package from the latest release. The AppImage updates itself, and the .deb / Fedora .rpm / Arch .pkg.tar.zst register their native repo on first install - from then on updates arrive through your package manager like any other package.
Per-distro repository setup (Fedora COPR, Debian/Ubuntu, openSUSE, Arch, Nix flake) with copy-paste snippets: unisic.app → Download or the installation docs.
Unisic starts in the background with a tray icon. Press a hotkey and go:
| Keys | Description |
|---|---|
| Meta + Shift + 1 | Capture the full screen |
| Meta + Shift + 2 | Capture a region |
| Meta + Shift + 3 | Capture the active window |
| Meta + Shift + G | Record a GIF (region) |
| Meta + Shift + R | Record video (region) |
| Meta + Shift + T | OCR - copy text out of a region |
| Ctrl + Esc | Stop recording (fixed emergency stop) |
Every hotkey is editable in Settings → Hotkeys. The same actions work from the command line (unisic --region | --fullscreen | --window | --gif), which is also how compositor keybinds should call it - see the docs for the full CLI, file locations and wlroots setup.
Needs Qt 6.5+, CMake and Ninja:
cmake -B build -G Ninja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build && ./build/unisicPer-distro dev packages and the optional features (recording / OCR) are listed in CONTRIBUTING.md.
Unisic collects nothing: no telemetry, no analytics, no account. The only network request it makes on its own is a release check against GitHub - details.
Issues and pull requests welcome. Found a bug? File an issue with your desktop, compositor, GPU and logs. See CONTRIBUTING.md for project layout and build instructions. Unisic is developed with agentic AI assistance (AGENTS.md); every generated change is read line by line and reviewed by the maintainer before it lands.
GNU GPL v3. See LICENSE and what that means.
Built by @DeBondor & @D3anDark. Inspired by Flameshot and Spectacle.
Uni approves this capture.