Screenshot to clipboard, on any Linux desktop.
Press a hotkey, drag a rectangle, paste it anywhere. Capy runs on X11 and Wayland, on GNOME, KDE, XFCE, sway and the rest, because it doesn't ship its own screen-grabbing code — it detects and drives whichever screenshot helper your distro already has.
- No runtime dependencies. Pure Python standard library. Pillow and ImageMagick are used if present, but nothing breaks without them.
- Own region selector. A frozen fullscreen overlay with a dimmed backdrop and a live pixel readout, so the selection is identical everywhere instead of whatever your desktop's picker happens to look like.
- Straight to the clipboard. Saving a file is opt-in.
pip install --user .Then check what your system can do:
capy doctorCapy needs one capture helper and one clipboard helper. Install whichever the doctor reports as missing:
| Distro | X11 | Wayland |
|---|---|---|
| Debian/Ubuntu | sudo apt install maim xclip python3-tk |
sudo apt install grim wl-clipboard python3-tk |
| Fedora | sudo dnf install maim xclip python3-tkinter |
sudo dnf install grim wl-clipboard python3-tkinter |
| Arch | sudo pacman -S maim xclip tk |
sudo pacman -S grim wl-clipboard tk |
| openSUSE | sudo zypper install maim xclip python3-tk |
sudo zypper install grim wl-clipboard python3-tk |
If you already have spectacle, gnome-screenshot, flameshot,
xfce4-screenshooter or ImageMagick, the capture side is already covered.
capy region # drag a rectangle -> clipboard
capy shot # whole screen -> clipboard
capy region --save-dir ~/Pictures/Screenshots
capy shot --no-clipboard --save /tmp/out.pngIn the selector: drag to choose a rectangle, Enter for the whole screen, Esc or right-click to cancel.
capy install-shortcut # Ctrl+Shift+Print -> capy region
capy install-shortcut --binding '<Super>s'This binds the key through the desktop's own settings (gsettings on GNOME/Cinnamon, xfconf on XFCE) because under Wayland an application cannot grab keys itself — the compositor owns them. On KDE, sway, Hyprland and others the command prints the exact recipe to paste into your config.
python3 -m venv .venv && .venv/bin/pip install -e '.[dev]'
.venv/bin/python -m pytestMIT