VerdiClip

Fast, faithful screenshots for Windows: grab a precise piece of the screen, mark it up, and put it where it needs to go — in seconds.

VerdiClip is an independent project. See ATTRIBUTION.md for credits.

Install

Requires Windows 10 or later and Python 3.13+.

uv tool install verdiclip

Or with pip: pip install verdiclip. Then run verdiclip (or verdiclip-gui for no console window) and VerdiClip sits in the system tray.

Capture

While selecting, the screen is frozen so you get exactly what you saw. A magnifier follows the cursor, arrow keys nudge it by a pixel (Ctrl for 10), Enter starts and finishes a selection from the keyboard, clicking without dragging captures the window under the cursor, and Esc cancels.

If Windows or another screenshot tool already owns PrtSc, VerdiClip tells you which hotkeys are taken; everything is still available from the tray menu, and you can choose other keys in Settings.

Annotate

• Labels in boxes. After drawing a rectangle or ellipse, just type — the text is centered and wraps inside it. Double-click (or Enter/F2) to edit later; Esc skips.
• Shift draws squares, circles, and 45° lines.
• Your styles stick. Colors, fills, widths, and fonts you pick are remembered per tool for the next screenshot.
• Rotate, flip, and resize from the Image menu or the toolbar's Image button. Your marks turn and scale with the picture; text stays upright. Resize works on what you see (after cropping), in pixels or percent, keeping the aspect ratio unless you untick it.
• Everything is undoable, including crop, which never throws pixels away.
• The quickest path: draw, Esc until nothing is selected, Enter — the image is on the clipboard and the editor closes. Closing an image you haven't copied or saved asks first (you can turn this off in Settings → Editor).

Settings

Open from the tray menu or with Ctrl+, in any editor.

• After capturing — any combination of: open in the editor, copy to the clipboard, save to the output folder.
• Hotkeys — validated as you type; conflicts are reported.
• Output — folder, file-name pattern ({date}, {time}, {title}, {counter}) with a live preview, format, JPEG quality.
• Editor — default color, width, and font.
• General — light, dark, or match-Windows theme; start at sign-in; show VerdiClip in Explorer's Open with menu for images. Make VerdiClip the default image app… opens Windows Settings at VerdiClip's Default apps page, where you choose it as the default (Windows requires you to confirm this yourself).

Command line

verdiclip capture screen -o shot.png
verdiclip capture region --region 0,0,1280,720 --clipboard
verdiclip capture window --delay 3
verdiclip open picture.png          # Opens in the running instance if there is one

How it is built

Start with docs/design/philosophy.md: the core purpose, the principles, and the architecture. docs/design/ux-contract.md specifies every interaction; each item has an automated journey test.

In short: an edit session is an immutable base image, a non-destructive crop, and a list of immutable annotation values. The only way to change it is a command through the undo history, and one renderer draws both the canvas and the exported image.

Development

Requires Windows 10+ and uv.

Run from the checkout

Run uv sync once in the repository root to create .venv and install dependencies. Then use either root launcher:

• Double-click Run-VerdiClip.bat in Explorer.
• From PowerShell, run .\Run-VerdiClip.ps1 (see Run-VerdiClip.ps1).

Both run .venv\Scripts\pythonw.exe -m verdiclip directly and return immediately, starting the tray app without a console window. A terminal opened by double-clicking the batch file closes after launch; an existing terminal stays available. The scripts work from any current directory and require Windows. If .venv is missing, run uv sync before trying again.

Development commands

uv sync                  # Create .venv and install dependencies
uv run verdiclip         # Run the tray app
uv run poe               # List tasks
uv run poe fix           # Format and auto-fix lint
uv run poe check         # Format check, lint, strict type check, tests with coverage
uv run poe ux            # UX journey tests only
uv run poe ux-snapshots  # Journeys plus a PNG per step in docs/ux/snapshots
uv run poe ux-gallery    # Key screens in light and dark themes (docs/ux/gallery)

uv run poe check is the quality gate: ruff (broad rule set), ty with every rule at error, and pytest with ≥ 90% branch coverage. Regenerate the README screenshots with uv run python scripts/ux_gallery.py --readme-dir docs/images. Before a release, also run the manual checklist at the end of the UX contract. See CONTRIBUTING.md for commit conventions and releases.

License

MIT