Starting a capture
Three routes, all reaching the same place:- New capture in the title bar, or
CtrlShiftSpace— opens the launcher. - A global shortcut for a specific mode — captures immediately, with your saved options, with no dialog. Works from the system tray with the window closed.
- The Capture menu.
The launcher
A grid of six modes plus the options that apply to a capture.
Modes your machine cannot do are shown disabled and tagged, not hidden. Hiding them would make
Snap look like a different application on different machines with no explanation.
Options
Options set in the launcher are remembered and are what a bare global shortcut uses.
What happens after a grab
Every capture is saved into your library first, always. Then:Because the annotation editor is not built, “Open in the editor” currently saves and tells you
the filename. Nothing is lost — the file is in your library either way.
Naming
New captures are named from a template,snap-%Y%m%d-%H%M%S by default, which sorts
chronologically in any file manager. Change it in Settings ▸ Capture.
Format
PNG by default — lossless, and what Compose wants. JPEG is offered for very large grabs where file size matters more than fidelity.About the pointer
Screen capture APIs do not include the mouse pointer, so Snap composites it in by hand.
The drawn fallback is deliberate: a screenshot that silently lost its pointer is worse than one
with an approximate arrow where the pointer actually was.
Multiple monitors and mixed scaling
A region capture is cropped out of a single composited grab of the whole desktop, rather than being requested as a sub-rectangle of one screen. That is what lets a region straddle two monitors with different scale factors and still come out coherent. When monitors have different scaling, the composite is built at the highest scale factor present, so a high-density display beside a standard one does not lose half its pixels. A window capture is also cropped from a desktop grab rather than read from the window itself. That means you get the window as it actually looked — including anything overlapping it — which is what people expect. Reading a window’s own buffer often produces a black rectangle for hardware-accelerated applications.On Wayland
Snap usesxdg-desktop-portal, which requires the portal plus a backend for your desktop
(xdg-desktop-portal-gtk, -kde or -wlr). With the portal:
- The compositor draws the selection interface, not Snap.
- Region, window and screen all become a single “let the user choose” prompt.
- The pointer option has no effect.
- Cancelling produces no error — Snap simply does nothing.
xdg-desktop-portal so it is diagnosable.
This is the reason Snap is not shipped for Linux. See Snap overview.