HACKER Q&A
📣 BraverHeart

Why isn't there a simple, seemless Windows screen recording app?


Seriously, I looked everywhere and I couldn't find anything that does the following in a straight forward way and with minimalist UI:

- Shortcut to show region selection (Something like taking a screenshot in Windows (SHIFT+WIN+S)

- After region selection, start recording immediately

- Stop recording and save in a predefined location

Features:

- Configure in advance whether to save as MP3 or GIF

Every tool I tried is either too bloated or has some extra steps that ruins the fluidity of the UX.

The closest thing I found is LiceCap, but this tool is GIF exclusive and has extra UI steps.

For someone that takes screen recordings every day, any tool becomes too tedious.

I wish I could build it myself, but time constraints.

  👤 rococode Accepted Answer ✓
ShareX can do this.

It lets you select a region + record with one hotkey, detects window borders and snap to those as regions, optionally converts between gif/mp4, and uploads to a variety of sites. Also handles screenshots with a quick built-in image editor, file uploads, and more. <10MB total size so fairly lightweight.

It's open source, too!

https://getsharex.com/

👤 z3t4
I use the built in screen recorder:

Window+Shift+S to take a screenshot

Window+G to bring up recording mode, then

Window+Alt+R to start recording

👤 PaulHoule
It may be more than you want by I swear by

https://www.techsmith.com/screen-capture.html

I use it for screenshots, demos, bug reports and other software dev tasks.

For other work I think the capture functionality is great but if I really need to edit video I will load it into Adobe Premier.

👤 thomastay
Consider Captura: https://mathewsachin.github.io/Captura/ and if that doesn't work for you, you can always fork it.

Warning: there are a lot of Captura clones in the Microsoft store, download it only from Github.

👤 WhaleClub
https://github.com/NickeManarin/ScreenToGif
👤 Saris
ShareX fits the bill. Also a fantastic screenshot tool. And will auto upload to tons of different online services, your own services, or just store locally.