Take a screenshot, mark it up, and copy the text out of it
The Screenshots section captures an area, a window, or the whole screen with one key, also in games, and keeps every capture findable by the words in it.
01Press the key, or click a tile
Open Screenshots, the first section under Create & edit. The tiles at the top are Area or window, Whole screen, Window in front, Copy text, Area after a pause, and Pick a colour, each with its shortcut next to it. Out of the box, Windows and Linux use Print Screen for an area or a window, Ctrl+Print Screen for the whole screen, Alt+Print Screen for the window in front, and Alt+Shift+T for Copy text; a Mac uses ⌃⌥4, ⌃⌥3, ⌃⌥5, and ⌃⌥T. The shortcuts work in every program and in games while ClipHearth runs, also when its window is closed and it sits in the tray. To change one, click it under SHORTCUTS and press the keys you want; Print Screen alone works too, and Backspace removes a shortcut.
02Choose the area
The screen freezes under a thin overlay, so menus and tooltips that would vanish stay on the picture. Drag to select an area (hold Shift for a square), or move over a window: it lights up and a click takes it. A click on the desktop or Enter takes the whole display, C copies the colour under the pointer, and Esc or the right button cancels. A magnifier next to the pointer shows the pixels, the coordinates, and the colour. In a full-screen game the area shortcut takes the whole screen without the overlay, so the game is not thrown to the desktop; crop the picture in the editor instead.
03What happens after a capture
Under AFTER A CAPTURE you choose, each on its own: Copy it to the clipboard, Save it in the screenshots folder, Show it in the corner, Open it in the editor, and Make it findable by its text. The small picture in the corner has Copy, Edit, Pin, Text, Send, Show in folder, and Delete, and you can drag it straight into a chat, an e-mail, or a folder. It takes no key presses away from the program you are in, is never on the next screenshot, and goes away after a few seconds unless the pointer is on it.
04Mark it up
The editor has an arrow, a line, a rectangle, an ellipse, a pen, a highlighter, text, a numbered step, blur, pixelate, a spotlight that darkens everything but a cut-out, and crop, with colours, line thickness, fill, undo and redo, and a magnifier. The marks are kept apart from the untouched original, so you can move or delete any of them later; the file in the folder is always the picture with the marks on it.
05Copy the text, pick a colour, pin a picture
Copy text lets you drag over any text on the screen, in a video, a picture, or a locked document, and it goes to the clipboard as text. The reading happens on your computer, nothing is sent anywhere; 32-bit Windows does not offer it. Pick a colour copies the colour of any pixel as #RRGGBB. Pin keeps a capture floating over every window: drag it to move it, scroll to resize it, hold Ctrl or ⌘ while scrolling to change how see-through it is, and double-click or press Esc to close it.
06Find it again
The list in the section shows every capture, and the search box finds them by the words in the picture, the program they were taken from, and the file name. Double-click opens the editor. Saved screenshots go to the ClipHearth Screenshots folder inside Pictures, as PNG or JPEG (SAVE lets you pick the format and the JPEG quality, and whether the mouse pointer is in the picture). A capture that was only copied stays in the list for two weeks, ready to copy, edit, or save. Screenshots never count as a trial task, however many you take.
07On Linux with Wayland
Wayland has no global shortcuts, so set one in your system's keyboard settings for the command ClipHearth.Desktop --screenshot area (or screen, window, text). It hands the capture to the running ClipHearth or starts it in the background. The area and the window are chosen in the system's own dialog.
Didn't solve it? Write to us - attach a diagnostics log if you have one. Missing a feature? Tell us what you would use it for; several of the recent ones started as a suggestion.