---

Why Clicadre

Raw screenshots are fine for you and harsh for everyone else. Sharp window edges, no breathing room, private details left in plain sight. The fix usually means three apps, or a paid one.

Clicadre does the whole job in one pass, in about five seconds:

Compared with what you probably use today

Features

• Region capture on the monitor under your cursor, with a pixel loupe and live dimensions. Space captures the full screen, Esc cancels.
• Redaction: blur (B) any area.
• Annotations: circle (O), rectangle (R), arrow (A). Hold Shift for perfect circles, squares and 45° arrows.
• Backgrounds: wallpapers, gradients, custom gradient, or none. Padding, corner radius and shadow sliders. Your last look is remembered.
• Output: Ctrl+C copies the full-resolution image, Ctrl+S saves a PNG to Pictures/Clicadre.
• Undo / redo (Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y), select and move (V), delete (Del).
• Lives in the notification area, optional launch at startup.

Install

Grab the latest installer from Releases:

• Windows 10/11: Clicadre_x.y.z_x64-setup.exe (per-user install, no admin rights needed)
• macOS 11+: Clicadre_x.y.z_aarch64.dmg (Apple Silicon) or _x64.dmg (Intel)

Builds are not code-signed yet. Windows SmartScreen may show "Unknown publisher": click More info → Run anyway. On macOS, right-click the app and choose Open the first time, then allow Screen Recording in System Settings.

Make Print Screen open Clicadre (Windows)

Windows 11 reserves Print Screen for its own Snipping Tool. Clicadre can hand the key over in one click: open Settings (top-right) and turn on Print Screen opens Clicadre.

This flips a single per-user setting (HKCU\Control Panel\Keyboard\PrintScreenKeyForSnippingEnabled), the same switch as Windows Settings → Accessibility → Keyboard. Turn it off to give the key back. If the Snipping Tool still opens, sign out and back in once.

The fallback shortcut Ctrl+Shift+X always works (⌘+Shift+2 on macOS).

How it works

flowchart LR
    K["Print Screen<br/>global shortcut"] --> C["Rust core<br/>captures the monitor<br/>under the cursor (xcap)"]
    C -- "raw RGBA over IPC" --> O["Overlay window<br/>frozen screen, drag to select"]
    O -- "selection rectangle" --> R["Rust core<br/>crops the pixels"]
    R -- "raw RGBA over IPC" --> E["Editor window<br/>blur · shapes · background"]
    E -- "rendered PNG / RGBA" --> X["Clipboard (arboard)<br/>or Pictures/Clicadre"]

1. Capture. A global shortcut wakes the Rust core, which grabs the monitor under the cursor with xcap and keeps the pixels in memory. Nothing is written to disk.
2. Select. A borderless, always-on-top window shows the frozen screen. It is pre-created at startup and only paints once the image is ready, so it appears instantly with no flash. Pixels travel as raw binary over Tauri's IPC, never as base64.
3. Crop. Your selection (converted to physical pixels, so it stays exact on HiDPI screens) is cropped natively.
4. Edit. The editor draws everything on a single canvas. The blur layer is computed once per capture, then only the regions you mark are composited, which keeps dragging at 60 fps even on 4K captures. Backgrounds are generated in code (mesh and linear gradients): no bundled images, sharp at any size.
5. Export. The same render function that draws the preview renders the full-resolution output, so what you see is exactly what you paste.

Project layout

src-tauri/            Rust core (Tauri 2)
  src/lib.rs          capture → crop → clipboard / file, window orchestration
  src/shortcut.rs     global shortcuts (Print Screen + fallback)
  src/settings.rs     language, Print Screen hand-over, launch at startup
  src/tray.rs         notification-area icon and menu
src/
  overlay/            region selection (frozen screen, loupe, dimensions)
  editor/             editor UI, render pipeline, generated backgrounds
  lib/                i18n (en/fr), IPC helpers, icons
  styles/             design tokens (OKLCH), overlay and editor styles
video/                Remotion project for the demo video

Tech stack

Build from source

Prerequisites: Node.js 20+, Rust, and the Tauri prerequisites for your OS (on Windows: Visual Studio Build Tools with the Desktop development with C++ workload).

git clone https://github.com/abg5f/clicadre.git
cd clicadre
npm install
npm run app:dev      # run with hot reload
npm run app:build    # build installers into src-tauri/target/release/bundle

On Windows, run Cargo from PowerShell or cmd. Git Bash ships its own link command, which shadows the MSVC linker.

Privacy

Clicadre works fully offline. It has no network code, no analytics and no account. Captures stay in memory until you copy or save them.

Roadmap

• Text annotations and numbered steps
• Window detection (click a window to capture it)
• Capture history
• Your current wallpaper or any image as background
• Aspect-ratio presets for social posts
• Signed builds

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome. Please keep the UI quiet (one accent color, system fonts) and run npm run build and cargo clippy before opening a PR.

License

MIT © abg5f