Spectacle is a simple application for capturing desktop screenshots. It can capture images of the entire desktop, a single monitor, the currently active window, the window currently under the mouse, or a rectangular region of the screen. The images can then be printed, sent to other applications for manipulation, or saved.
Spectacle is the default capture software for KDE Plasma 5.
The software is released under an open source license.
Key Features
- Capture the entire desktop (default).
- Capture the current monitor.
- Capture the active window.
- Capture the window currently under the cursor, including parents of pop-up menus.
- Capture the window currently under the cursor, excluding parents of pop-up menus.
- Capture a rectangular region of the screen.
- Start in GUI mode (default).
- Take a screenshot and exit without showing the GUI.
- Start in DBus-Activation mode.
- Save image to specified file in background mode.
- Wait for a click before taking screenshot.
- Export captures to Imgur, send to device, NextCloud, Send via Bluetooth, Send via Email, and Twitter.
- Image formats supported: Windows BMP image, JPEG-2000 JP2 image, JPEG image, PNG image, TIFF image, Windows icon, WBMP image, WebP image, EPS image, MacOS X icon, PCX image, Softimage PIC image, PBM image, PGM image, RGB image, TGA image, XBM image, and XPM image.
Website: invent.kde.org/plasma/spectacle
Support:
Developer: Boudhayan Gupta and others
License: GNU General Public License v2.0

Spectacle is written in C++. Learn C++ with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Screen Capture Tools | |
|---|---|
| Spectacle | Simple KDE application for capturing desktop screenshots |
| Ksnip | Qt-based cross-platform tool that provides many annotation features |
| flameshot | Complete screen capture and snipping tool with unique features |
| Shutter | Feature-rich screenshot program |
| ScreenGrab | Competent Qt-based tool |
| Satty | Modern screenshot annotation utility with a clean interface |
| swappy | Wayland native snapshot editing tool |
| CoreShot | Simple lightweight screen capture utility for C-Suite |
| gscreenshot | Graphical interface and command line frontend for multiple backends |
| GIMP | The GNU Image Manipulation Program |
| shotman | Lightweight screenshot tool designed for Wayland desktops |
| GNOME Screenshot | Screen capture tool for GNOME |
| xfce4-screenshooter | Flexible screenshot utility for the Xfce desktop environment |
| wayscrollshot | Scrolling screenshot tool for Wayland |
| SnipText | Screen capture OCR tool |
| Perl Screenshot Tool | Works best on X11. It also supports Gnome Wayland |
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