Screenshots and 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.

-- Select an area and open it in swappy:
hl.bind("Print", hl.dsp.exec_cmd('grim -g "$(slurp)" - | swappy -f -'))

-- 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, with explicit configuration for copying to clipboard and saving to a file:

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

Waytator

Waytator is a screenshot annotator and lightweight image editor made in C.

hl.bind("Print", hl.dsp.exec_cmd("grim -t ppm - | waytator"))

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" }))

Recording utilities

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

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

wl-screenrec

wl-screenrec is a high performance wlroots screen recording, featuring hardware encoding

# Record the whole screen:
wl-screenrec -f ~/Videos/recording.mp4

# Record a selected region:
wl-screenrec -g "$(slurp)" -f ~/Videos/recording.mp4

GPU Screen Recorder

GPU Screen Recorder is a screen recorder that has minimal impact on system performance by recording your monitor using only the GPU, similar to ShadowPlay on Windows.

# Record the whole screen with audio in 60 FPS:
gpu-screen-recorder -w screen -f 60 -a default_output -o ~/Videos/recording.mp4