A screenshot tool for macOS, Windows, and Linux — free, open source, and cross-platform from its first commit rather than as a later port.
Scrozz is not a released application yet. There is no download, no installer, and no version you should rely on for daily work.
On macOS it takes real screenshots today, from the menu bar and the command line. On Windows and Linux there is substantial, compiling, CI-tested implementation — but no human has yet sat down and used Scrozz as an application on either. Until someone has, this README will not call them supported. The status table below is exact about which is which.
Scrozz captures your screen and puts the result somewhere useful — on the clipboard, in a file, or dragged straight into whatever app you are already working in.
The part that makes it unusual is not the capture. It is that the
cross-platform core existed in the first commit, before any platform was
finished. macOS-first-then-port is how tools quietly become macOS-only: platform
assumptions get baked into the core long before anyone notices. So all three
backends compile on every push, and the interface is rendered and pixel-diffed
on all three in CI — the reasoning is in
docs/decisions.md (D3) and the machinery in
docs/platforms.md.
macOS is polished first because it is the maintainer's daily driver, and dogfooding is what actually gets an app finished.
Read this as a map of what is proven, not what is planned.
Verification levels
- ✅ Works — implemented, and used by a human on real hardware.
- 🟡 Implemented, not confirmed by hand — real code against the real platform API, covered by automated tests. On Windows and Linux that means it compiles for the target, links, and passes the suite on that platform's CI runner — nobody has run it as an app.
- 🟠 Partial — some of the pieces exist; the feature does not yet stand up end to end.
- ⬜ Not started — types and contracts only, or nothing at all.
- 🚫 Not available, by design — the platform genuinely cannot, and Scrozz says so rather than failing silently (D8).
| Area | macOS | Windows | Linux | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Screen / display capture | ✅ | 🟡 | 🟡 | ScreenCaptureKit · Windows.Graphics.Capture · X11 + desktop portal |
| Window & region capture | ✅ | 🟡 | 🟡 | Wayland cannot enumerate windows; the portal picker is used instead |
| Save, clipboard, encoding | ✅ | 🟡 | 🟡 | Shared, platform-agnostic code — one implementation, tested everywhere |
| Menu-bar / tray app | ✅ | 🟡 | 🟡 | One cross-platform tray item; only the macOS one has been run by a person |
| Global hotkeys | ✅ | 🟡 | 🟠 | Works where the desktop allows it. Wayland cannot grab keys, so Scrozz refuses and hands you the exact compositor config line to bind the CLI instead (D11) |
| Capture stack overlay | ✅ | ⬜ | ⬜ | The native overlay window is retrofitted on macOS only; elsewhere it reports unsupported rather than silently doing nothing. GNOME/Wayland cannot position overlays at all — the adaptation is D31 |
| Drag-out to another app | 🟡 | ⬜ | ⬜ | The hero interaction (D12): promised-file drag exists on macOS; other backends are planned, not written |
| Text recognition (OCR) | ✅ | 🟡 | 🚫 | On-device system engines: Vision · Windows.Media.Ocr · Linux ships none |
| Capture history | 🟠 | 🟠 | 🟠 | Local SQLite persistence and retention exist in scrozz-store; the history commands are not wired up yet |
| Command-line interface | ✅ | 🟡 | 🟡 | Every capture the app can take, headlessly (D11) |
| Annotation editor | 🟠 | 🟠 | 🟠 | The document model and renderer exist; the editing interface does not |
| Screen recording | ⬜ | ⬜ | ⬜ | Contracts only. Hardware encoders only, for licence reasons |
| Scrolling capture | ⬜ | ⬜ | ⬜ | No clean implementation exists on any platform; deliberately deferred |
What 🟡 rests on, precisely. Three automated layers, described in full in
docs/platforms.md: every target type-checks from a single
machine; every push builds, links and tests on real macOS, Windows and Linux
runners; and the interface is rendered headlessly and pixel-diffed on all three,
which is why "does it look right on Windows" is not an unanswered question. What
none of that can prove is behaviour in a live desktop session — whether the
overlay steals focus mid-sentence, whether a hotkey survives a lock screen,
whether a permission dialog says something a person can act on. That is a real
gap, it is stated in docs/platforms.md as layer 4, and it is why Windows and
Linux are not called supported here.
The road from 🟡 to ✅ runs through that layer 4: real desktop sessions on
each platform, a person driving the app, and the rough edges that only a live
session reveals fixed one at a time. The plan, the four layers, and the honest
account of where the asymmetry sits are all in
docs/platforms.md.
You will need Rust 1.98 or newer. Full Xcode is optional — it is used only to compile the layered macOS 26 app icon, and the build skips that step cleanly without it.
git clone https://github.com/thatcube/scrozz.git
cd scrozz
tools/make-app-bundle.sh # builds and installs /Applications/Scrozz.app
open /Applications/Scrozz.appThe bundle is not a convenience. macOS attaches a Screen Recording permission to a bundle identity, so a bare binary run from a terminal has the grant land on the terminal instead and capture is refused no matter how many times you approve it. Build the app, approve it once in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Screen Recording, and the grant sticks across rebuilds.
Scrozz then lives in the menu bar. It is invisible at rest by design (D27) — the captures appear, the app does not.
The CLI is not a wrapper around the app; it is the same capability, headless, and it is a stable contract (D11). It is also how Scrozz gets hotkeys on compositors that refuse to provide them.
cargo run -p scrozz -- list displays
cargo run -p scrozz -- list windows
cargo run -p scrozz -- capture --display primary -o shot.png
cargo run -p scrozz -- capture --region 0,0,1200,800 --json
cargo run -p scrozz -- ocr shot.png
cargo run -p scrozz -- settings get
cargo run -p scrozz -- --helpCommands that are not built yet say so and exit with a distinct status rather
than pretending — history, for instance, currently reports that it is not
implemented. Exit codes are part of the contract, so scripts can tell "no such
window" apart from "not implemented" apart from "permission denied".
Capture from a bare cargo run will be refused on macOS until you have built and
approved the app bundle above, for the permission reason described there. That
refusal is deliberate and tells you exactly which setting to change.
One script runs everything CI runs, with the same flags:
tools/dev.sh # the full command list
tools/dev.sh check # type-check for this machine
tools/dev.sh lint # clippy, warnings denied
tools/dev.sh test # the test suite
tools/dev.sh platforms # type-check macOS + Windows + Linux, from any of them
tools/dev.sh golden # headless golden-image tests
tools/dev.sh ci # everything, in CI's order — the answer before pushingtools/dev.sh platforms is the one worth knowing about: it type-checks the
Windows and Linux code against the genuine API surface without a Windows or Linux
machine, which turns most cross-platform mistakes into a compile error on your
own laptop instead of a CI round trip days later.
Before writing platform code, read
docs/platforms.md — particularly the recorded gotchas,
several of which are APIs that return success while doing nothing at all.
The documentation is the design. Decisions are binding and written down before implementation:
| Document | What it is |
|---|---|
docs/decisions.md |
Every architectural decision (D1–D31), with the reasoning and what it rules out |
docs/platforms.md |
The cross-platform strategy, the four verification layers, and what Windows and Linux still need |
docs/feature-audit.md |
The authoritative feature inventory, per-platform feasibility, and the backlog |
docs/research/ |
The research the decisions were made from |
AI_DISCLOSURE.md |
How Scrozz is built, and what it does not do |
TRADEMARK.md |
What you may do with the name |
If you are changing behaviour, the decision record is the place to start. If a decision is wrong, say so and change it there first — that is what it is for.
A screenshot tool sees your screen, including things you never meant to share. That earns a direct answer rather than a marketing adjective, so:
Scrozz contains no AI. No language model, no inference, nothing generated. It does not upload your captures anywhere, has no telemetry, no analytics, no account, no sign-in, and no server to talk to. There is nothing to monetise because nothing leaves your machine. Text recognition runs on device, using the recogniser already built into your operating system.
You can check that rather than believe it: there is no HTTP client anywhere in
the dependency tree — search Cargo.lock for reqwest, hyper, ureq or
curl and you will come up empty. An application that cannot make a web request
cannot phone home.
Coding agents did assist with implementation. Brandon Moore conceived Scrozz, researched it, designed the product and its visual identity, made every architectural decision, tested the results, branded it, and maintains it; agents wrote code against decisions that were already made, and built the automated checks that prove that code does what it claims. That arrangement was written down as D5 before most of the code existed, alongside D25, which exists for the blunt reason that an agent cannot see — so every product image is generated by a headless harness and diffed by the build, rather than trusted.
The full version, including how to verify each claim, is in
AI_DISCLOSURE.md.
Scrozz began as a study rather than as code, and the repository's own history shows it: the first commits are a feature audit, four research reports, and the decision record — architecture, licensing, platform strategy and interaction design were argued out and written down before the workspace existed at all. Concept and research preceded implementation. How long they preceded it is not recorded anywhere in this repository, so this README does not guess.
The first code lands afterwards, and the ordering is deliberate: the cross-platform verification harness before the capture backends, the platform backends before the interface, the interface before the app. The commit titled "Scrozz takes its first real screenshot" comes only once all of that is standing. Everything since has been macOS polish and cross-platform groundwork.
The whole design argument — including the decisions that were made, reversed, and
corrected along the way — is preserved in
docs/decisions.md. None of it was reconstructed after the
fact.
Brandon Moore — founder, product designer, researcher,
and maintainer. Scrozz is his: the idea, the research, the architecture, the
visual identity and icon, the testing, and the decisions about what ships. Every
commit in this repository is authored by him, which you can confirm with
git shortlog -sne.
Contributions are welcome. The design decisions in
docs/decisions.md are binding, and the fastest way to get a
change merged is to say which decision it serves — or which one it means to
revisit.
Please open an issue. Your operating system and version, your desktop environment on Linux, and what you expected to happen all help a great deal.
Screenshots often contain more than you intend — check yours before attaching it, and never paste credentials or tokens into an issue.
Scrozz is free and open source, with no paid features, no paywall, and no ads. If it turns out to be useful to you and you would like to chip in toward its upkeep, donations are welcome and genuinely appreciated. Anything is plenty, and not donating is completely fine.
Donate via GitHub Sponsors — one-time or recurring.
GPL-3.0, with a store-distribution exception © 2026 Brandon Moore.
The licence covers the code, and the freedom to use, change, and sell it is
the point. It does not cover the name: "Scrozz" and the Scrozz logo are
trademarks, so a modified version needs a different name. The reasoning, and
exactly what you may do without asking, is in
TRADEMARK.md.
Other products named anywhere in docs/ are the trademarks of their owners,
referred to descriptively for comparison only (D24).
Scrozz is one of a set of free, open-source apps by Brandon Moore. Same principles throughout: your data stays yours, nothing is monetised, and nothing is hidden behind an account.
| App | What it does |
|---|---|
| Hozz | Apple Health, exported to storage you own |
| Mozz | Your music, wherever it lives |
| Plozz | Movies & TV on Apple TV, iPhone & iPad |
| Twozz | Twitch on Apple TV, with real emotes |
| Scrozz | Screenshots that go where you need them — you are here |
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