Peek - an animated GIF recorder

[!IMPORTANT] The Peek project has been declared deprecated, please read the announcement. No new features will be developed and issue reporting has been closed.

Simple screen recorder with an easy to use interface

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Contents

• About
• Requirements
  • Runtime
  • Development
• Installation
  • Official distribution packages
  • Flatpak
  • Snappy
  • AppImage
  • Ubuntu
  • ElementaryOS
  • Debian
  • Fedora
  • Solus
  • Arch Linux
  • Other distributions
  • From source
• Frequently Asked Questions
  • How can I capture mouse clicks and/or keystrokes?
  • How can I improve the quality of recorded GIF files
  • Why are the GIF files so big?
  • If GIF is so bad why use it at all?
  • What about WebM or MP4? Those are well supported on the web.
  • What is the cause for "Could not start GNOME Shell recorder" errors?
  • Why can't I interact with the UI elements inside the recording area?
  • My recorded GIFs flicker, what is wrong?
  • On i3 the recording area is all black, how can I record anything?
  • Why no native Wayland support?
• Contribute
  • Development
  • Translations
• License

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About

Peek makes it easy to create short screencasts of a screen area. It was built for the specific use case of recording screen areas, e.g. for easily showing UI features of your own apps or for showing a bug in bug reports. With Peek, you simply place the Peek window over the area you want to record and press "Record". Peek is optimized for generating animated GIFs, but you can also directly record to WebM if you prefer.

Peek is not a general purpose screencast app with extended features but rather focuses on the single task of creating small, silent screencasts of an area of the screen for creating GIF animations or silent WebM videos.

Peek runs on X11 or inside a GNOME Shell Wayland session using XWayland. Support for more Wayland desktops might be added in the future (see FAQs below).

Requirements

Runtime

• GTK+ >= 3.20
• GLib >= 2.38
• libkeybinder3
• FFmpeg >= 3
• GStreamer 'Good' plugins (for recording on GNOME Shell)
• gifski (optional but recommended for improved GIF quality)

Development

• Vala compiler >= 0.22
• Meson >= 0.47.0
• Gettext (>= 0.19 for localized .desktop entry)
• txt2man (optional for building man page)

Installation

Official distribution packages

Peek is available in official package repositories for the following distributions:

• Alpine Linux
• Arch Linux
• Debian
• Fedora
• Gentoo
• NixOS
• OpenSUSE Tumbleweed
• Parabola
• Solus

Flatpak

Peek can be installed on all distributions supporting Flatpak from Flathub. To install, either download com.uploadedlobster.peek.flatpakref and open it with GNOME Software or install via command line (first time flatpak users need to follow the flatpak/flathub setup instructions first):

flatpak install flathub com.uploadedlobster.peek

For full functionality you should also install xdg-desktop-portal-gtk. It is available for most current distributions. Once installed, you can run Peek via its application icon in your desktop environment or from the command line:

flatpak run com.uploadedlobster.peek

To update to the latest version run:

flatpak update --user com.uploadedlobster.peek

To test the latest development version you can install peek-master.flatpakref

Snappy

Peek no longer has officially supported Snap packages, see the announcement. Please consider using the Flatpak or AppImage versions or use the Ubuntu PPA if you are using Ubuntu.

AppImage

Peek AppImage packages are available on the release page. To run download the .AppImage file and set it executable, then just run it. You can name the file however you want, e.g. you can name it just peek and place it in $HOME/bin for easy access. See the AppImage wiki for more information on how to use AppImages and integrate them with your system.

Ubuntu

You can install the latest versions of Peek from the Ubuntu PPA.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:peek-developers/stable
sudo apt update
sudo apt install peek

If you want to use the latest development version there is also a PPA with daily builds available. Use the repository ppa:peek-developers/daily in the above commands.

ElementaryOS

Adding PPA repositories requires the package software-properties-common

sudo apt install software-properties-common
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:peek-developers/stable
sudo apt update
sudo apt install peek

If you want to use the latest development version there is also a PPA with daily builds available. Use the repository ppa:peek-developers/daily in the above commands.

Debian

There are official Debian packages for Debian 11 ("Bullseye") and Debian 10 ("Buster") via main repository and packages for Debian 9 ("Stretch") via stretch-backports repository. Please refer to Debian Backports Website for detailed usage of stretch-backports repository.

After enabling stretch-backports for Debian 9 (Debian 10 or Debian 11 or Sid don't need any tweaks at all), installation can be done by simply typing:

sudo apt install peek

Fedora

Note: Fedora by default does not provide the required ffmpeg package in its repositories. For this reason it is recommended for Fedora users to install Peek with Flatpak, see above. If you prefer to install Peek from the repositories you should install ffmpeg separately as described below.

Peek is available in the default repositories (Fedora 29 and later):

sudo dnf install peek

To install the required ffmpeg package you can use the RPM Fusion free repository, see the setup instructions for RPM Fusion. Once the repository is enabled install FFmpeg with:

sudo dnf install ffmpeg

Solus

Solus users can simply install with:

sudo eopkg it peek

Arch Linux

Arch Linux users can simply install with:

sudo pacman -S peek

For GNOME Shell recording there are some optional packages you can choose from:

gst-plugins-good: Recording under Gnome Shell
gifski: High quality GIF animations with thousands of colors

If you have a package manager for AUR (or fetch from AUR manually) the git version is available here

Other distributions

See the Repology package list for a list of Peek packages for various distributions.

From source

You can build and install Peek using Meson with Ninja:

git clone https://github.com/phw/peek.git
cd peek
meson --prefix=/usr/local builddir
cd builddir
ninja

# Run directly from source
./src/peek

# Install system-wide
sudo ninja install

Note: ninja might be called ninja-build on some distributions.

Frequently Asked Questions

How can I capture m