Screenshots & Recording

This page lists commonly used tools for taking screenshots and recording the screen on Hyprland.

Screenshot utilities

grim and swappy

grim is a simple Wayland screenshot tool. It is commonly used with slurp for area selection and swappy for annotations.

For example, to select an area and open it in swappy:

hl.bind("Print", hl.dsp.exec_cmd('grim -g "$(slurp)" - | swappy -f -'))

To copy a selected area directly to the clipboard, install wl-clipboard and use:

hl.bind("SUPER + Print", hl.dsp.exec_cmd('grim -g "$(slurp -d)" - | wl-copy'))

Satty

Satty is a powerful and modern screenshot annotation tool inspired by swappy and Flameshot. It’s been created to provide improvements over existing screenshot tools and is an almost drop-in replacement for swappy.

For example, to take a screenshot and open it with satty, Ctrl-C to copy to clipboard and Ctrl-S saves it to ~/Pictures/Screenshots/:

hl.bind("Print", hl.dsp.exec_cmd('grim - | satty -f - --copy-command wl-copy -o "~/Pictures/Screenshots/%Y%m%d_%H%M%S.png"'))

Flameshot

Flameshot is a screenshot tool with a built-in annotation UI. On Wayland, it relies on portal support for screen capture. If it cannot capture the screen, make sure your desktop portal setup is working or use grim with swappy instead.

HyprCapture

HyprCapture is a Hyprland-oriented screenshot and recording utility. It is useful if you want a workflow that is integrated with Hyprland instead of wiring several smaller tools together.

WeChat screenshot

WeChat has its own screenshot shortcut. If Hyprland catches the keybind first, WeChat will not receive it unless the keybind is explicitly passed to the WeChat window.

Use the pass dispatcher to forward Alt + A to WeChat:

hl.bind("ALT + A", hl.dsp.pass({class = "^(wechat)$"}))

The pass dispatcher sends both the press and release events to the matched window, so a separate bindr is not needed. This is useful for application shortcuts that need to behave like global shortcuts while still being handled by the application itself.

If the bind does not work, check the actual WeChat window class:

hyprctl clients

Then adjust the matcher accordingly. For example, if your package reports a different class, replace class:^(wechat)$ with the class shown by hyprctl clients.

Recording utilities

OBS Studio

OBS Studio can record the screen through PipeWire and the desktop portal. Make sure pipewire, wireplumber, xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland and qt6-wayland are installed. See Screen sharing for portal setup notes.

wf-recorder

wf-recorder is a lightweight Wayland screen recorder.

Record the whole screen:

wf-recorder -f ~/Videos/recording.mp4

Record a selected region:

wf-recorder -g "$(slurp)" -f ~/Videos/recording.mp4

If capture tools are blocked by Hyprland’s permission system, see Permissions.