Crisp

Native Win32 screen capture for Windows: region, window, active window, monitor and full virtual desktop, with a pixel magnifier, a twelve-tool annotation editor, OCR through the Windows engine, pin-to-screen and a local history. One statically linked executable, no third-party libraries.

Copy to clipboard is the only default output action. Save to file, open editor, pin to screen, reveal in folder, copy path, copy file, OCR to clipboard and upload are all off until you turn them on.

Two downloads on the releases page, both the same executable:

• Crisp-x.y.z-portable-x64.zip — unzip and run. Writes nothing outside HKCU, or nothing at all if you drop an empty Crisp.ini next to it.
• Crisp-x.y.z-setup-x64.exe — Start menu entry, optional desktop shortcut, optional start-at-sign-in, and an uninstaller. Asks for no administrator rights: with none it installs under your own profile. Uninstalling removes what it installed and leaves your settings alone.

Ctrl+Shift+S. The overlay freezes the whole virtual desktop and paints that frozen bitmap, so nothing can move underneath you mid-selection and the magnifier reads real pixels.

• Drag to select. Hold Shift to snap to a square — it snaps on and off mid-drag.
• Enter accepts, 6 px minimum per side. Esc, right-click or middle-click cancels.
• A click too short to be a drag captures the window under the cursor instead.
• The magnifier — ×ばつ21 pixels at ×ばつ, with coordinates, hex colour and a swatch — is on by default.
• Releasing does not capture. The rectangle settles and stays adjustable: drag a handle to resize, drag inside it to move, Enter or a double-click inside to capture. Small selections drop to corner handles only, and smaller ones to none at all, so the handles never crowd out the room to move.
• A settled selection grows a bar: copy, save, edit, recognise text, pin, upload. Enter still does whatever After capture says; the bar is how you do something different this once without changing the defaults. The upload button is absent, not greyed, when no service is chosen.

Five more keys, all of them named in the on-screen hint:

Ctrl+V accepts 1200x630, 1200 ×ばつ 630, 1200, 630 and the exact text Ctrl+C writes — separators are ignored, numbers are not. Give it four numbers and it positions the rectangle too.

Once a selection is settled the monitor keys reshape it instead of capturing; Enter remains the one commit.

Select a region and Crisp scrolls the window under it, capturing as it goes, then joins the frames into one tall image — a long page or a chat log in one piece rather than three screenshots aligned by hand.

It stops on its own at the end of the page, at 30 frames, or as soon as two frames cannot be matched. It refuses rather than guesses: any two images have a best-fitting offset, and treating that as an answer would silently produce a picture made of two unrelated strips.

Not every window scrolls from a wheel event, and Crisp says so rather than handing back a single frame dressed up as a long one.

• Window — the same overlay with hover highlighting forced on. Capture uses the DWM extended frame bounds, so no strip of desktop comes along.
• Active window — no overlay at all: raises the foreground window, waits 220 ms, captures it.
• Monitor under the cursor, or all monitors in one blit.
• Last region — replays the last dragged rectangle, clamped to the current layout, and silently does nothing if none was stored. Click-picked windows are never stored.
• Delayed — 3 s by default, 1–30, for region, window or monitor. With notifications off the countdown is invisible, though the wait still happens.

Every path is a GDI BitBlt of what is genuinely on screen — no DXGI, no PrintWindow, which returns black frames for hardware-accelerated content. The cursor is drawn in by hand and is off by default.

Clipboard writes CF_DIB and a registered PNG format, so alpha-aware applications get real alpha.

Off by default. Twelve tools — select, arrow, line, rectangle, ellipse, pen, highlighter, text, step number, blur, mosaic, crop. 1–9 and 0 pick them, V is select, C is crop. Shift snaps rectangle to square, ellipse to circle, line and arrow to 45 degrees.

• Blur is a box blur — redaction wants irreversibility, not elegance — and mosaic averages each tile's own pixels. Both scale with the selection.
• Rotation is quarter turns only, and lossless. Scale is a fixed 25/50/75/100/150/200 menu that always resamples from the preserved original, so 25 % and back to 100 % returns real pixels.
• Effects: flip horizontal and vertical, auto-crop, padding, grayscale, invert, sepia, sharpen, and brightness, contrast and saturation in fixed steps.
• Undo and redo, up to 64 document snapshots. The select tool moves, deletes, restyles and resizes a shape — one proportional mapping, so an arrow keeps its direction and a freehand curve keeps its shape.
• Blur, mosaic and crop preview live while you drag. Blur is a redaction tool; finding out it was not enough after you let go means looking at the thing you were hiding one more time. Crop dims what will go rather than outlining what will stay.
• The text tool appends only: no caret navigation, no selection.
• Crop, rotate, scale and every effect bake the annotations into pixels and clear the shape list. One undo reverses both.
• Drop an image file on the window to edit it without capturing anything first.

Files are written as PNG, JPEG or WebP through Windows Imaging Component. WebP needs the optional Windows encoder component; without it the option is hidden, and a configured WebP quietly saves as PNG rather than losing the capture.

Select text straight off the screen, OCR a region, or open OCR mode inside the editor with drag word-range selection, Ctrl+A and Ctrl+C.

Recognition is the Windows engine, Windows.Media.Ocr. No Tesseract, no bundled language data — it works only if your Windows profile languages include an OCR-capable language pack. When they do not, the About window says so and the mode declines to open. Word boxes are re-sorted into reading order by vertical overlap, because the engine's own line grouping fragments things like code. Post-capture OCR is off by default.

Puts a capture in a topmost layered window: drag anywhere on it, wheel to zoom, double-click for actual size, right-click for copy, save as, opacity and close. Its Save As is PNG-only regardless of your chosen format. Off by default.

Pins survive a restart: position, zoom and opacity go to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Crisp\Pins as plain PNGs plus a tab-separated index, and come back when Crisp next starts. Killing the process from Task Manager still loses them — the save runs on a clean exit.

A plain folder of PNGs in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Crisp\History — no index, no database, ordered by file timestamp — so deleting one in Explorer simply removes it. Twenty-four entries by default, 0–200, and 0 disables recording entirely. Always PNG whatever your save format is, and no annotation or source-window data is kept. Editing an entry creates a new one and leaves the original untouched. In the window: double-click or Enter to edit, Ctrl+C to copy, right-click to reveal, delete or clear all.

Off twice over: the service defaults to none, and the "upload and copy the link" after-capture option defaults to off. Nothing leaves the machine until you pick a service yourself. Tick that after-capture option and every capture uploads on its own — the one thing here that can surprise you after you have opted in, which is why it sits last in a list of nine where the other eight keep the image on your machine.

Every service in the list is one somebody else runs. Read what you are sending before you send it.

Thirteen services. The list is split in two, with a divider, and every entry says how long its links live and what it costs you:

• Without a key the request is never built; there is no anonymous fallback.
• Most services hand back a direct image link. qu.ax and temp.sh return a page with the image on it, not the image itself — fine for sending to a person, no good as an <img src>. bashupload.app serves its files as downloads rather than displaying them, and 24 hours is its ceiling.
• The returned link goes to the clipboard. No browser is opened.
• HTTPS only, over WinHTTP, with no certificate checks relaxed. bashupload answers with an http:// address; it is upgraded before it reaches you.
• The API key is stored in plain text in the registry or the ini file. It is masked on screen and nowhere else.
• The list is closed — no custom or self-hosted endpoint.
• Recent links live in the tray menu: the last ten, click one to copy it again.
• Slow services take fifteen to twenty seconds. A notification stays up for the whole wait, counting the seconds, and the result replaces it.

Nothing else here touches the network: no update check, no telemetry, no crash reporting.

Six global hotkey slots, and any slot can be bound to any of the eleven actions. Four ship bound: Ctrl+Shift+S region, Ctrl+Shift+F monitor, Ctrl+Shift+W window, Ctrl+Shift+D delayed. Two ship empty.

• Modifiers are optional — a bare F9 is a legal hotkey. Bind a letter or a digit on its own and you lose that key everywhere else; the settings window says which keys those are.
• Print Screen is a separate always-region toggle, on by default. A slot that claims Print Screen wins over it, and Windows' own "use PrtScn to open Snipping Tool" setting can take the key first — logged as a conflict, not an error.
• Backspace or Delete clears a slot. A slot set to no action keeps its key but never registers it, leaving the combination free for other applications.

Active window, all monitors, last region, text select, region OCR, colour picker and history have no default hotkey. All of them are in the tray menu, and all of them are on the command line:

Crisp.exe -region

region, window, active, monitor (or fullscreen), all, last, delayed, delayed-window, delayed-monitor, scroll, text, ocr, color, history. A / prefix works as well as -. An unknown or missing argument means region capture; a bare path opens that image in the editor.

Settings live in HKCU\Software\ShadesOfDeath\Crisp. Put a Crisp.ini next to the executable — it may be empty — and Crisp uses that file instead; its existence is the whole of portable mode. Missing or tampered values fall back to defaults per key rather than wholesale, and if you manage to turn every output action off, copy-to-clipboard is forced back on. The interface is translated into 16 languages.

MSVC only — CMake hard-fails on any other compiler. C++20, CMake 3.25 or newer, the Windows SDK, no external dependencies and no package manager step. The application manifest declares Windows 10/11.

tools\build.ps1 -Config Release -Test -Package -Installer

-Installer needs Inno Setup (winget install JRSoftware.InnoSetup); everything else needs nothing but MSVC. Or by hand:

cmake -S . -B build\Release -G Ninja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build\Release

Output is build\Release\Crisp.exe, linked against the static CRT so there is nothing to install beside it. -CoreOnly builds the non-UI library and the tests without the interface layer; -Package produces the portable ZIP. There is no installer and no MSIX manifest.

327 tests run as a single CTest entry against crisp_core, the static library holding everything that never creates a window — which is what makes the capture pipeline testable at all. A GitHub Actions workflow builds, tests and packages on every push. No test asserts anything about what is on screen at the time: one that expected particular pixels would pass on one machine and fail on the next.

MIT. See LICENSE.