Overview

Spectacle is the screenshot utility that ships with the KDE desktop and, in practice, one of the most complete free screenshot tools on Linux. It is a small application with a single job: capture the whole desktop, one monitor, the active window, the window under the mouse, or a rectangle you drag out with the mouse – then hand the result on to the annotation editor, the clipboard, a file, the printer, or any program registered for PNG on the system.

Development happens inside KDE: the source lives in KDE’s GitLab instance, releases follow the KDE release service (three major releases a year, numbered YY.MM), and the current release is 6.8.1 from 20 October 2026. It is written in C++ with Qt 6 and KDE Frameworks 6, and although it is built for Plasma it also runs on non-KDE X11 desktops – a stated design goal in the project’s own README – so an Xfce, i3 or Openbox session can use it without dragging in a full Plasma desktop.

Two things are worth knowing before you install it. First, it is a desktop capture utility, not a screencast suite: it takes stills, and recording is left to other tools. Second, distribution packages lag badly – Debian 12, for example, ships Spectacle 22.12 even though upstream is at 6.8 – so the features below describe the current 6.x line, and an older packaged build will have a plainer interface.

Key features

• Five capture modes – entire desktop, current monitor, active window, window under the mouse, and rectangular region. The region selector shows a live size readout.
• Delay and On Click – a countdown before the shot, or the “On Click” option, which waits for your next click instead of a timer – the reliable way to capture menus, tooltips and pop-up dialogs that vanish the moment you move the mouse.
• Decoration and pointer control – include or exclude the mouse pointer, include or exclude window titlebars and borders, and restrict window capture to the current pop-up only.
• Built-in annotation editor – the Annotate button opens the image editor where you draw on the capture before exporting it. Versions from 22.12 onward use KDE’s KQuickImageEditor component for this.
• Save, copy, export, print – save to PNG/JPEG/WebP with a configurable default location and filename pattern, copy straight to the clipboard, open the shot in any PNG-associated application, print it, or send it through KIPI export plugins.
• Remembers your last save mode – if you always save as JPEG to a specific folder, Spectacle reopens with exactly that, and “Quit after manual Save or Copy” turns the whole thing into a two-click workflow.
• A real command line – the same binary works headless for scripts (see below).

Scripting and automation

Spectacle is unusually friendly to automation for a GUI utility. The same executable accepts the capture mode as a flag and can run entirely in the background, which makes it usable from cron jobs, hotkey daemons and shell scripts:

• -f full desktop, -m current monitor, -a active window, -u window under the cursor, -t transient pop-up only, -r rectangular region
• -b capture and exit without showing the window, -n suppress the notification, -d delay in milliseconds, -o write to a given file, -c copy to the clipboard instead

So spectacle -b -m -o /tmp/screen-$(date +%s).png is a complete timed capture in one line – no X automation, no extra dependency.

Why use it

Most Linux screenshot tools are either minimal (a region grab and nothing else) or part of a larger annotation suite that wants a document model and a project file. Spectacle sits in the useful middle: every capture mode a desktop user needs, a competent annotator behind one button, and a CLI that makes it scriptable – all under a GPL licence, maintained by the same team that maintains the desktop it runs on.

It is also the option that integrates cleanly with Plasma: it is invoked by the Print Screen key out of the box, and it is the tool KDE’s own screenshot shortcuts and bug reporters expect.

Typical uses

• Documentation and bug reports – grab one window with decorations, annotate the offending control, copy and paste into an issue.
• Capturing menus and hover states with “On Click” instead of racing a countdown.
• Repeatable scheduled captures (dashboards, kiosks, build monitors) through the CLI.
• Multi-monitor setups – capture the current monitor only, at the monitor’s native resolution.
• Quick region grabs for chat and email, then straight to the clipboard.

Spectacle runs on both X11 and Wayland sessions, and on non-KDE X11 desktops such as Xfce, MATE, i3 and Openbox as well as on Plasma. It is packaged as kde-spectacle in Debian and its derivatives, is available from most distributions’ repositories, and installs from Flathub and Snap.

Licence

GPL-2.0-or-later – free and open source. The KDE application page lists it as GPL-2.0+, and the source is developed in the open on KDE’s GitLab.

Alternatives in this directory

• Kazam – simple screencasting and screenshot capture for X11
• Kooha – minimal screen recorder built for Wayland
• Peek – tiny animated-GIF screen recorder
• SimpleScreenRecorder – full-featured desktop recorder
• VokoscreenNG – screencast and webcam recorder with a GUI
• GPU Screen Recorder – hardware-accelerated capture with a replay buffer

Browse the full directory of free and open source tools for more.