Wayland Screen Capture for GNOME, KDE, Sway & Hyprland
Screention takes screenshots through the native XDG Desktop Portal, or grim where there is no portal, and lets you annotate them in place on GNOME, KDE Plasma, Sway, and Hyprland. No hacky environment variables needed.
$ curl -fsSL https://screention.gkernel.com/install.sh | bashInstalls the .deb with apt, the .rpm with dnf or zypper, or the AppImage on other distros. x86_64 only. Needs Ubuntu 22.04, Debian 12, Linux Mint 21, Fedora 38 or newer, or openSUSE Tumbleweed.
How Screention captures on Wayland
Wayland enforces strict process isolation. Screention bridges the security boundary cleanly using official protocols.
Desktop Environments (GNOME & KDE)
Communicates directly with the Freedesktop XDG Desktop Portal. When you trigger a capture, Screention asks the portal for a screenshot and the compositor returns the screen image. On GNOME, Screention gives itself the screenshot permission, so you are not asked each time.
Tiling Window Managers (Sway & Hyprland)
On custom compositors without portal backends, Screention detects and uses grim to take the screenshot, then opens its annotation editor.
Complete annotation toolkit, native on Wayland
No need to export images to GIMP or Pinta just to draw an arrow or redact a credential.
Native XDG Portal Integration
Takes screenshots through org.freedesktop.portal.Screenshot, the standard Wayland screenshot interface.
Automatic Grim Fallback
Built-in fallback to grim for Sway, Hyprland, and minimal tiling Wayland window managers without a screenshot portal.
Instant In-Place Markup
Draw arrows, circles, rectangles, and freehand markup in 12 curated colors directly on your captured area.
Privacy Blur & Redaction
Mask confidential server hostnames, tokens, and passwords with pixelate, blur, or a solid box.
Offline OCR to Clipboard
Extract text from error messages, terminal sessions, or video frames directly to your clipboard, on your device.
Local & Private
Screen captures and OCR text stay on your local machine, and a screenshot is uploaded only if you choose Upload. No logins, and usage counts can be turned off in Settings.
Frequently asked questions
Why is Wayland screen capture harder for tools like Flameshot?
Under the legacy X11 display server, any application could read the entire screen buffer without restriction. Wayland isolates client windows for security, so traditional screen-grabbing APIs return black screens or permission errors. Screention communicates with the native XDG Desktop Portal (the official Freedesktop security standard) to request screen buffers securely from your compositor.
Which Wayland compositors are supported?
Screention uses the XDG Desktop Portal on GNOME Shell (Mutter) on Ubuntu/Fedora/Debian and on KDE Plasma (KWin). On standalone tiling compositors like Sway, Hyprland, and river, it falls back to grim when no screenshot portal is available.
What if my compositor doesn't implement the XDG Desktop Portal?
For lightweight or custom Wayland compositors that lack a portal backend, Screention includes an automatic fallback to grim. Simply install grim through your package manager (e.g., sudo apt install grim or sudo pacman -S grim), and Screention uses it when the portal is not available.
Can I annotate directly on Wayland captures?
Yes. Once the screen is captured, Screention displays an instant in-place annotation toolbar with arrows, boxes, circles, highlighters, privacy blur/pixelation, and offline OCR text extraction.
How do I install Screention on a Wayland system?
You can run our 1-line script (curl -fsSL https://screention.gkernel.com/install.sh | bash) on Ubuntu/Debian/Mint, install via .rpm on Fedora, or run our universal .AppImage on Arch/Manjaro.