Native · Rust · MIT

Capture, annotate, done.

HydroShot is a fast, lightweight screenshot tool in pure Rust — region and window capture, 14 annotation tools, OCR, pin-to-screen, and anonymous Imgur upload. No Electron, no browser engine.

hydroshot — region capture
1 960 × 540
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Selection 960 × 540 · arrow, box, text, blur, step, OCR — then copy, save, pin

Capabilities

Quiet capture. Loud annotation.

A small native binary that starts instantly, gets out of the way, and hands you a full annotation surface the moment you drag a selection.

Native, no Electron

Pure Rust with winit for windowing and tiny-skia for 2D drawing. No web view, no browser engine — just a small binary that launches instantly.

Capture any way

Region by drag, window by click, full multi-monitor coverage, or a delayed capture with a 3 / 5 / 10-second countdown. Inactive areas dim so your selection pops.

14 annotation tools

Arrow, rectangle, circle, rounded rect, line, pencil, highlight, spotlight, text, pixelate, step markers, eyedropper, and measurement — all with command-pattern undo/redo.

Export everywhere

Copy to clipboard, save to file, pin the capture on top as a reference, upload anonymously to Imgur, or pull the text out with the Windows OCR API.

Dark + light theme

Themed end to end with Terminal Workbench. Toggle dark or light in Settings; the five presets map to the theme's semantic hues.

Tray + global hotkey

Lives in the system tray with optional autostart. Press Ctrl+Shift+S from anywhere to capture — rebind it, and the whole toolbar and shortcuts, in Settings.

Workflow

Hotkey, select, ship.

1

Press the hotkey

Hit Ctrl+Shift+S from anywhere (rebindable), or pick region / window / delayed capture from the tray menu.

2

Select and annotate

Drag a region or click a window, then draw with 14 tools. Every stroke is on an undo/redo stack, so nothing is destructive.

3

Copy, save, or share

Press Enter to copy to the clipboard, or save to file, pin on top, upload to Imgur, or extract the text with OCR.

Get started

Install in under a minute.

Recommended

Windows

  1. Open the latest release.
  2. Download the .msi installer or the portable .zip.
  3. Run it — a tray icon appears; press Ctrl+Shift+S.

Linux

  1. Download hydroshot-*-linux-x64.tar.gz from the latest release.
  2. Extract, then chmod +x hydroshot.
  3. Run ./hydroshot (X11 region capture is experimental).

Build from source

  1. Install Rust 1.80+.
  2. git clone the repo and cd HydroShot.
  3. cargo build --releasetarget/release/hydroshot.