30 open-source projects similar to phw/peek, ranked by shared indexed features. Tags may describe platforms or build tools rather than the same primary purpose. Check each project’s use case, license, and deployment requirements before treating it as a replacement.
ScreenToGif is a screen recording and GIF editor designed to capture screen activity and refine frames to produce GIF animations and video files. It functions as a screen-to-video capture tool for creating visual demonstrations, documentation, and tutorials. The application includes a non-linear frame editor that allows for the modification of recorded footage before export. It can capture a selected screen area, webcam feed, or sketchboard, and exports the resulting animations as images, videos, or GIFs. The tool supports user interface translation to provide a localized experience in multi
Licecap is an animated GIF capture utility designed to record desktop screen activity and export the results as portable GIF image files. It functions as a screen recorder that allows users to capture a selected area of the screen and save the recording as a short animation. The tool includes a selection overlay for defining the recording area via mouse interactions and utilizes palette-based encoding to compress captured frames into a single looped GIF file. It integrates with Windows and macOS APIs to manage screen capture permissions and window positioning. The application covers a range
Kap is an open-source screen recording application designed to capture desktop activity as video or image files. It provides a comprehensive workflow for recording screen sessions, including options for capturing system audio and highlighting mouse clicks to assist in the creation of instructional content. The application distinguishes itself through a modular, plugin-based architecture that allows for the integration of external services for sharing and uploading media. It utilizes a background transcoding utility to process and convert captured recordings into various formats, such as GIF,
QuickRecorder is a screen recording software designed for capturing desktops, application windows, and system audio. It functions as a multi-device video recorder and tutorial capture tool, synchronizing video feeds from a computer and connected mobile devices into a single stream. The system distinguishes itself through an alpha-channel video exporter that produces recordings with transparent backgrounds. It also includes a presenter overlay system that renders a floating camera feed over screen captures and a specialized tutorial toolset that provides mouse movement highlighting and a magni
Kooha is a screen recorder for Linux desktops that utilizes the Wayland protocol and XDG Portals for secure recording. It functions as a hardware-accelerated screen capture tool that offloads video compression to the GPU to reduce CPU load and power consumption. The application integrates the PipeWire framework to capture system and microphone audio streams and leverages FFmpeg for muxing video streams and exporting various codecs and containers. Its user interface is a native Linux application built with the GTK toolkit. The software covers screen recording and capture of entire displays, s
Recordly is a screen recording and video editing suite designed for creating product demonstrations. It combines screen and audio capture software with a dedicated demo video editor and tools for merging webcam overlays and exporting projects as MP4 files or looping GIFs. The platform features a specialized cursor animation engine that applies smoothing, motion blur, and click animations to the rendered mouse movements. It also provides customizable webcam bubbles and a system for placing recordings inside styled containers with custom wallpapers and drop shadows. The editing workflow center
Terminalizer is a command-line utility designed to record, edit, and share terminal sessions. It captures raw input and output streams from terminal processes, storing them in structured files that preserve the exact sequence of commands and their visual results for future review, archiving, or documentation. The tool distinguishes itself by offering extensive visual customization and flexible export options. Users can modify the timing, content, and appearance of recordings—including themes, fonts, and window frames—through a configuration schema. These sessions can be rendered into high-qua
Captura is a desktop screen recording and screenshot utility designed to capture video, webcam feeds, and system audio into multimedia recordings. It functions as a recording suite that can also be operated as a command line video recorder, allowing users to trigger and manage capture workflows via terminal commands. The software distinguishes itself by recording user input, such as mouse movements and keystrokes, as visual overlays on top of the captured video. It further supports automated workflows through the integration of system-level hardware media keys, enabling recording state change
Gifski is a native macOS desktop application and video processing utility designed to convert video files into high-quality animated GIFs. It functions as a video-to-GIF converter that allows for the adjustment of frame rates and dimensions to balance visual fidelity with file size. The tool features capabilities for animation loop generation, including the creation of bounce effects by reversing video playback. It employs palette-based color quantization and error-diffusion dithering to maintain color accuracy and reduce banding in the final output. The application integrates with macOS sys
This project is a desktop screen capture and annotation utility designed for Linux environments. It provides an interactive graphical overlay that allows users to select specific screen regions, apply visual annotations such as shapes, text, and pixelation, and manage the resulting images through a configurable post-capture pipeline. The application distinguishes itself through deep system integration and automation capabilities. It operates as a persistent background daemon that monitors global hotkeys and supports inter-process communication via a system message bus, enabling users to trigg
Screenpipe is a local-first platform designed to record, index, and analyze desktop activity. By capturing screen, audio, and keyboard input, it creates a comprehensive and searchable history of computer usage. The system functions as an activity recorder and automation framework, providing a persistent, context-aware memory that allows artificial intelligence agents to observe and interact with local desktop environments. The platform distinguishes itself through a privacy-focused architecture that processes all data locally. It utilizes on-device computer vision and speech recognition to tr
ccapture.js is a JavaScript library for recording HTML5 canvas animations at a fixed framerate. It exports captured animation sequences as WebM movie files, animated GIFs, or archives of individual PNG and JPEG images. The library ensures smooth video output by hooking into the browser's animation loop to decouple rendering from real time. This deterministic frame pacing allows for high-resolution recording without frame drops, regardless of rendering complexity or hardware performance. The tool manages the process by extracting raw pixel data from the canvas into memory buffers before assem
Keycastr is a system-level utility for macOS that captures and displays keyboard and mouse interactions as visual overlays on the desktop. By registering global event taps within the operating system, it monitors input actions in real time and renders them through transparent, non-interactive windows that float above other active applications. The application distinguishes itself through a plugin-based architecture that allows for the integration of custom modules to define how input events are rendered. Users can manage the lifecycle and positioning of these visual elements through a native
This project is a terminal automation and recording tool that uses a custom declarative scripting language to execute command-line sequences. It functions as a framework for both generating animated media files and performing automated terminal output validation. By managing isolated pseudo-terminal sessions, it captures and renders terminal interactions into high-quality GIFs, videos, or static images. The tool distinguishes itself through its ability to treat terminal sessions as testable, repeatable artifacts. It supports golden-file testing, allowing users to verify command-line behavior
This project is a community-curated directory of open-source software designed for deployment in private server environments and home labs. It serves as a comprehensive resource for discovering independent, self-hosted alternatives to mainstream cloud services, enabling users to maintain full data ownership and control over their digital infrastructure. The directory is structured through a hierarchical taxonomy that organizes a vast collection of applications into logical categories, ranging from media management and data analytics to private communication and team productivity tools. It dis
ShareX is a desktop utility designed for screen capture, image annotation, and automated file sharing. It provides a comprehensive suite of tools for capturing screen regions, windows, or scrolling content, and includes a layered image editor that allows users to manipulate, scale, and transform graphical elements and annotations directly on captured media. The application distinguishes itself through an event-driven post-capture pipeline that triggers automated workflows, such as image processing, external command execution, or file uploads, immediately after a capture event. Users can exten
Cap is a self-hosted screen recording and video collaboration platform designed for teams to replace synchronous meetings with asynchronous video updates. It provides a comprehensive suite for capturing high-resolution desktop activity, including system audio, microphone input, and camera overlays, which are then processed through an integrated post-production workflow. The platform distinguishes itself by offering full data sovereignty through containerized deployment and object storage abstractions, allowing users to host their media assets on private infrastructure or S3-compatible buckets
Greenshot is a Windows screen capture tool and productivity suite designed to capture screen regions, specific windows, or full displays as image files. It functions as an image annotation editor and external image uploader, allowing users to process visual assets before saving or sharing them. The project emphasizes automated workflows through the use of global hotkeys and command-line routing to send captured files to external applications. It supports high-resolution displays with specific scaling for high DPI screens to ensure visual consistency. The software provides capabilities for im
Robotgo is a cross-platform desktop automation framework for the Go programming language. It provides a comprehensive toolkit for programmatically interacting with graphical user interfaces, enabling developers to simulate human input, manage application windows, and monitor system-wide hardware events. The library distinguishes itself through its low-level system integration, utilizing a foreign function interface to interact directly with native operating system APIs. It employs pixel-buffer memory mapping and real-time screen capture to perform visual element identification, allowing for i
Robotjs is a native Node.js automation library and desktop input simulator. It uses C++ bindings to provide low-level access to operating system functions, allowing for the programmatic control of the mouse and keyboard and the analysis of screen pixels. The library functions as a toolkit for automating user interfaces and desktop workflows, including those within Electron applications. It enables the simulation of key presses and mouse movements to automate interactions with desktop software and perform automated data entry. Its capabilities extend to screen pixel analysis, where it capture
Hyperion is an ambient lighting controller and screen color capture engine designed to synchronize networked LED hardware with real-time video and audio content. It functions as a programmable lighting effects engine and networked server, capturing frames from system displays or USB devices to extract dominant colors for immersive lighting environments. The system distinguishes itself through a protocol-agnostic hardware abstraction layer and a coordinate-based LED mapping system that uses keystone correction for precise physical alignment. It features a modular scripting engine for custom vi
Flameshot is a cross-platform desktop screenshot tool and image annotation utility. It provides the ability to capture full displays or specific screen regions and save them as image files. The software features a built-in editor for adding arrows, shapes, text, and markers to screen captures for visual documentation. It also includes functionality for transferring captured and annotated images directly to external hosting services for remote storage and sharing. The utility includes a command line interface for automating screen captures, managing application settings via scripts, and trigg
Agent-S is a multimodal AI agent and LLM desktop automation framework designed to control operating systems through graphical user interface interactions. It functions as a computer use interface, utilizing vision-language grounding to translate natural language goals into precise screen coordinates and system actions. The project differentiates itself by combining structured accessibility tree inspection with vision-based element localization. It manages cross-application workflows by mapping conceptual descriptions to physical pixels and simulating low-level keyboard and mouse events to mov
ShaderGlass is a GPU-accelerated shader pipeline designed to render real-time visual effects as an overlay on the desktop or specific application windows. It processes visual input through programmable fragment shaders to modify screen output or live video feeds. The project supports the import of custom shader definitions and the hot-loading of external files to test and tune visual effects without restarting. It includes a library management system for browsing presets and adjusting specific parameters to refine the final output. The application routes input from various sources, including
gifski-app is a native macOS desktop application used to convert video files into high-quality animated GIFs. It functions as both a standalone tool and a macOS system extension, allowing for the transformation of media files into animations with configurable dimensions, frame rates, and looping options. The application includes a specialized bounce animation generator that creates yo-yo effect images, which play forward and then backward in a continuous loop. Integration with the macOS ecosystem enables conversion directly from the system share menu within other applications. The software a
This project is a WebRTC plugin for Flutter that provides a real-time communication framework for implementing peer-to-peer voice, video, and data streaming. It functions as a cross-platform media streamer and hardware media controller, allowing applications to manage device cameras and microphones across mobile, desktop, and web platforms. The framework includes a dedicated peer-to-peer data channel interface for exchanging arbitrary data packets with low latency. It ensures privacy and data integrity through end-to-end encryption for all audio, video, and data transmissions. Broad capabili
SmarterStreaming is a cross-platform SDK for hardware-accelerated audio and video capture, encoding, and streaming. It provides a complete media pipeline for low-latency RTMP and RTSP streaming, and includes an embedded lightweight RTSP server that can serve live feeds directly from the source device to local network clients without requiring a separate server. The SDK also integrates with GB28181 surveillance platforms, enabling compliant device registration and streaming for standardized video monitoring systems. The project distinguishes itself through a set of integrated capabilities for
RecordRTC is a JavaScript library for capturing audio, video, and screen streams within the browser. It functions as a media recording tool that enables the capture of media streams and their export as playable files. The library provides specialized utilities for recording desktop windows or entire screens and capturing 2D or 3D animations from canvas elements. It handles these tasks by interfacing with browser media stream objects to save activity as video files.
This library provides a server-side utility for generating animated GIF images directly within PHP applications. It functions by synthesizing visual assets in real-time, allowing developers to combine multiple frames and dynamic data into a single binary stream that adheres to the standard animation format. The tool distinguishes itself by integrating programmatic control over HTTP headers alongside image generation. By managing cache-control and content-type headers during the server response cycle, it dictates how browsers and email clients store or refresh visual content. This capability e
This project is a PHP library designed to automate image compression by orchestrating external command-line binaries. It provides a unified interface for managing the execution, configuration, and error handling of system-level tools, allowing developers to integrate image optimization directly into server-side application workflows or automated build pipelines. The library distinguishes itself through its ability to chain multiple independent processing tools into a single, sequential workflow. By defining custom optimization sequences and configuring specific command-line arguments, users c