SnipIT

A professional snipping tool for Windows 11 written in pure PowerShell 7.5+ on .NET 9. Hover-to-highlight smart capture, magnifier loupe, floating widget, system tray, chromeless Fluent preview with a full annotation editor — all in a single script with zero external dependencies and no admin elevation.

Features

Capture

• Smart capture — hover any window to highlight it and click to grab, or drag for a custom region. One overlay, two gestures, with a pixel-perfect magnifier loupe and live screen-coordinate readout.
• Full virtual-desktop capture spanning all monitors (handles negative-origin layouts).
• Active window capture — grabs the foreground window by its exact window rect.
• Per-monitor DPI aware — accurate capture at 100 % / 125 % / 150 % / 200 %.

Preview window

• Chromeless Fluent UI — WPF Fluent theme, Segoe Fluent Icons, draggable header, pin-on-top, resizable, maximizable.
• Zoom — Zoom In / Zoom Out / Fit-to-viewport buttons, Ctrl + +, Ctrl + -, Ctrl + 0, and Ctrl + mouse-wheel all work. Range 5 % – 1000 %. Live zoom indicator in the header.
• Pan (Hand) mode — the default when no annotation tool is selected: click and drag anywhere on the image to scroll a zoomed-in view. Cursor auto-switches between Hand and Cross.

Annotations

• Four annotation tools: Highlight, Rectangle, Arrow, Text
• Six-color palette (yellow / green / pink / blue / orange / red) with live in-place color updates — change color while typing a text annotation and the foreground swaps immediately
• Undo / Redo with full history (Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Shift+Z)
• Right-click any annotation to change its color or delete it
• Clear all button to wipe the annotation layer
• Annotations are stored in image-pixel coordinates so they survive zoom and export cleanly

Output

• Copy to clipboard — flattened with all annotations baked in (Ctrl+C)
• Save as — PNG / JPG / BMP, default path ~\Pictures\Snips\snip-yyyyMMdd-HHmmss.png (Ctrl+S)
• New snip — close the preview and start a fresh capture (Ctrl+N)

System integration

• System tray with full menu (capture modes, open snips folder, about, uninstall, exit)
• Floating capture widget — auto-hiding top-center pill with Smart/Full/Window buttons
• One configurable Smart-capture hotkey registered via RegisterHotKey on a hidden message-only form; Full and Window capture stay available from the tray
• Single-instance enforced by a per-session named mutex; a second launch shows a friendly message instead of stacking up
• Self-installing: first launch copies the app and durable settings to %LOCALAPPDATA%\SnipIT, creates a Desktop shortcut, and synchronizes the shell:startup shortcut from the LaunchAtSignIn setting. No admin. No UAC prompts.

Hotkeys

Global

Hotkey	Action
Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Q	Smart capture (hover-window or drag-region)
Esc / right-click	Cancel an active capture

Full virtual-desktop and active-window capture intentionally have no global hotkey; use the system-tray menu for those modes.

Preview window

Hotkey	Action
Ctrl+C	Copy flattened image to clipboard
Ctrl+S	Save as PNG / JPG / BMP
Ctrl+N	New snip
Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Shift+Z	Undo / Redo
Ctrl + + / Ctrl + -	Zoom in / out
Ctrl + 0	Reset zoom to 100 %
Ctrl + mouse-wheel	Zoom centered on cursor
Esc	Close preview

Install

1. Make sure you have PowerShell 7.5+ and Windows 11 (pwsh --version)
2. Download SnipIT.ps1
3. Double-click it (or run pwsh -Sta -File .\SnipIT.ps1)

On first run SnipIT silently:

• Copies itself to %LOCALAPPDATA%\SnipIT\SnipIT.ps1
• Creates %LOCALAPPDATA%\SnipIT\settings.json for the Smart hotkey, save defaults, widget visibility, and launch-at-sign-in preference
• Creates a Desktop shortcut
• Creates or removes the shell:startup shortcut to match LaunchAtSignIn (enabled by default)
• Generates a SnipIT.ico on the fly
• Shows a tray balloon: "SnipIT installed. Press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Q to capture."

To uninstall: right-click the tray icon → Uninstall. Removes both shortcuts and the %LOCALAPPDATA%\SnipIT folder.

Usage

After installation, SnipIT runs in the system tray. Press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Q, hover the window you want, click. The preview window opens with the captured image. From there:

• Annotate — click a tool, pick a color, drag on the image. Click the active tool again (or Esc) to return to pan mode.
• Zoom in to detail — Ctrl + mouse-wheel or the zoom buttons; then drag the image to pan around.
• Change an existing annotation — right-click it to pick a new color or delete it.
• Type a text annotation — click the Text tool, click on the image, type, click a different color mid-typing to re-color live, press Enter to commit (or click elsewhere). Escape discards.
• Copy or save — Ctrl+C / Ctrl+S, or the toolbar buttons.
• New snip — Ctrl+N or the toolbar button to close the preview and drop straight back into the capture overlay.

Architecture

SnipIT keeps a portable single-file distribution while using modular, reviewable development sources. The ownership and generation flow is:

src/*.ps1 + xaml/*.xaml
          │
          ▼
  Build-SnipIT.ps1
          │
          ▼
      SnipIT.ps1

• src/00-Core.ps1 owns cross-platform pure logic and the -CoreOnly boundary.
• src/10-Bootstrap.ps1 owns startup, settings, installation, and XAML loading.
• src/20-Native.ps1, src/30-Capture.ps1, src/40-Preview.ps1, src/50-Tray.ps1, and src/90-Main.ps1 own their named runtime layers.
• The six files in xaml/ own UI markup.
• Build-SnipIT.ps1 is the sole authority for module/XAML order and generation.

SnipIT.ps1 is generated, checked in, portable, and has no runtime dependency on the repository. Never edit it directly; edit src/ or xaml/ and rebuild.

Development

# Run authoritative modular development sources (Windows)
pwsh -Sta -File ./SnipIT.Dev.ps1

# Regenerate the portable checked-in release
pwsh -NoProfile -File ./Build-SnipIT.ps1

Commit the regenerated SnipIT.ps1 with every source or XAML change. CI runs the builder and rejects a stale release with git diff --exit-code -- SnipIT.ps1.

Preview-window internals

The preview window's mouse interaction, zoom, text-editing and color-picking are all organized as named closures captured at window-creation time ($beginPan, $updatePan, $endPan, $beginDraw, $updateDraw, $finishDraw, $openText, $pickColor, $handleMouseDown, $setZoom, $zoomBy, $fitToViewport). The real WPF event handlers are one-line wrappers that compute mouse positions and delegate to these closures. This keeps the event handlers trivial and — more importantly — gives the test harness a way to drive every code path without synthesizing real MouseButtonEventArgs.

Show-PreviewWindow accepts an optional -TestAction [scriptblock] parameter that runs the callback during Loaded (while ShowDialog is blocking, so function-local variables stay alive) and then closes the window off-screen. The interactive harness uses this to run end-to-end tests against a headless preview window.

Setting the environment variable SNIPIT_TEST_MODE=1 before dot-sourcing the generated release or development launcher short-circuits installation and shortcut writes as well as the single-instance mutex, tray setup, hotkey registration, and main loop, so a harness can load functions without side effects.

Tests

All suites are zero-dependency (no Pester). The harness reports current totals at runtime, so this documentation does not become stale as coverage grows.

# Build/generation contract and failure fixtures (any platform)
pwsh -NoProfile -File .\Test-SnipIT-Build.ps1

# Pure-logic suite against the generated release (any platform)
pwsh -NoProfile -File .\Test-SnipIT.ps1

# Pure-logic parity against authoritative development sources
$env:SNIPIT_SCRIPT_UNDER_TEST = '.\SnipIT.Dev.ps1'
pwsh -NoProfile -File .\Test-SnipIT.ps1

# Full generated-release WPF suite (Windows only)
Remove-Item Env:SNIPIT_SCRIPT_UNDER_TEST -ErrorAction Ignore
pwsh -NoProfile -Sta -File .\Test-SnipIT-Interactive.ps1

# Focused development-launcher WPF smoke (Windows only)
$env:SNIPIT_SCRIPT_UNDER_TEST = '.\SnipIT.Dev.ps1'
$env:SNIPIT_TEST_GROUP = 'Floating Studio preview shell'
pwsh -NoProfile -Sta -File .\Test-SnipIT-Interactive.ps1
Remove-Item Env:SNIPIT_TEST_GROUP,Env:SNIPIT_SCRIPT_UNDER_TEST

Test-SnipIT-Build.ps1

Locks manifest order, module/function parity, embedded XAML parity, deterministic generation, formatting, provenance, parser safety, and transactional failure behavior.

Test-SnipIT.ps1

Covers pure logic and behavioral contracts through -CoreOnly, against either SnipIT.ps1 or the injected SNIPIT_SCRIPT_UNDER_TEST development launcher.

Test-SnipIT-Interactive.ps1

Drives a real off-screen preview window via -TestAction. Coverage:

• Zoom — SetZoom, ZoomBy, compounded zoom, clamps (0.05 / 10), ZoomText update, FitToViewport
• Pan — default Hand cursor, drag → Scroller offset, EndPan cursor restore, no-op when not panning
• Tool selection — Highlight / Rect / Text interlock, cursor switching
• Drawing — highlight / rect / arrow with coord mapping at 1× and 2× zoom, short-arrow auto-discard
• Colors — all six palette entries applied to new annotations via ActiveColor and via PickColor
• Undo / Redo
• Hit test — Find-AnnotationAt topmost wins, outside returns -1
• Flattening — Get-FlattenedBitmap dimensions and type
• Full click dispatch via HandleMouseDown — pan / draft / text / out-of-bounds / editing-text branches
• Text tool — OpenText creates a TextBox; empty commit discards; typed commit appends annotation; live PickColor foreground swap during editing; Render-Annotations applies annotation.Color to the rendered TextBlock

Project files

File / folder	Purpose
src/	Authoritative PowerShell implementation modules
xaml/	Authoritative WPF markup
Build-SnipIT.ps1	Deterministic manifest, embedding, validation, and release generator
SnipIT.Dev.ps1	Development launcher for authoritative repository sources
SnipIT.ps1	Generated, checked-in, standalone distribution; never edit directly
Test-SnipIT-Build.ps1	Build determinism and failure-contract fixtures
Test-SnipIT.ps1	Cross-platform pure-logic tests, no dependencies
Test-SnipIT-Interactive.ps1	Windows WPF integration tests, no dependencies
docs/	Long-form docs (design mocks, deeper write-ups). docs/README.md is the index.
CHANGELOG.md	Per-merge change history (Keep a Changelog format).
SECURITY.md	Vulnerability disclosure policy + supported versions.
AGENTS.md	Authoritative agent/contributor brief and engineering constraints
CLAUDE.md	Compatibility pointer to AGENTS.md
shared/runbooks/engineering-standards.md	PowerShell variant of the company-canonical engineering-standards runbook.
.bestpractices.json	OpenSSF Best Practices self-assessment (project 12647).
LICENSE	MIT

Roadmap

• Scrolling / long-page capture
• Blur / pixelate annotation
• OCR via Windows.Media.Ocr — copy text from a snip
• Persisted preferences (rebindable hotkeys, default save folder, widget position)
• Capture-history gallery
• Drag-and-drop the snip out to other apps (Slack, Teams, file explorer)

License

MIT — see LICENSE.