Windows Screenshot Raycast Extension

A Windows-native screenshot extension for Raycast, providing fast, keyboard-driven screen capture capabilities on Windows 10 and 11.

Features

• Capture Screen: Instantly captures the entire screen across single or multi-monitor setups.
• Capture Region: Interactive full-screen selection overlay with real-time dimension indicators (W × H px), blue selection border, and ESC or right-click cancellation.
• Capture Window: Interactively select and capture any application window with real-time hover highlight and DWM frame precision, excluding invisible drop-shadow margins.
• Extract Text (OCR): Native Windows WinRT OCR engine extracts text locally and offline from screen captures or image files directly into your clipboard.
• Flexible Output: Configure output to Save to disk, Copy image directly to the clipboard, or both simultaneously (Save + Copy).
• High-DPI & Multi-Monitor: Fully DPI-aware coordinate calculation matching actual screen resolution.
• Zero External Dependencies: Powered natively by Windows GDI32, Win32 APIs, WinRT OCR, and .NET Framework built into Windows.

---

Commands

Command	Description	Mode
Capture Screen	Capture a screenshot of the entire screen	no-view
Capture Region	Select a rectangular area of the screen to capture	no-view
Capture Window	Select and capture an application window	no-view
Extract Text	Extract text from an image or screenshot using local Windows OCR	view

---

Preferences

You can customize the extension behavior in Raycast Preferences (Cmd/Ctrl + ,):

Preference	Type	Default	Options / Details
Screenshot Output	Dropdown	Save + Copy	Save + Copy, Save, Copy
Screenshot Save Location	Directory	~/Pictures/Screenshots	Directory path to save image files

Save Location Path Expansion

The save location supports standard Windows path conventions:

• Tilde expansion: ~/Pictures/Screenshots
• Environment variables: %USERPROFILE%\Pictures\Screenshots
• Custom absolute paths: C:\Users\YourName\Desktop

If the destination directory does not exist, it will be created automatically.

File Naming Convention

Screenshots are saved using the timestamp format:

Screenshot YYYY-MM-DD HH-mm-ss.png

Example: Screenshot 2026-08-11 13-42-18.png

If a file collision occurs, unique index suffixes are automatically appended (e.g. Screenshot 2026-08-11 13-42-18 (1).png).

---

Technical Architecture

This extension uses a native Windows execution engine:

• GDI32 BitBlt & User32: Used for pixel-perfect frame grabbing from screen device contexts (GetDC, BitBlt).
• Desktop Window Manager (DWM): DwmGetWindowAttribute with DWMWA_EXTENDED_FRAME_BOUNDS is used to capture visible window bounds cleanly without transparent shadow margins.
• WinForms Overlay Engine: Interactive region capture utilizes a borderless full-screen form showing a pre-captured desktop image with a dimmed translucent mask (Color.FromArgb(120, 0, 0, 0)), blue bounding box, and dimensions badge.
• Windows Clipboard (System.Windows.Forms.Clipboard): Writes native DIB/Bitmap image data directly to the clipboard, making it instantly pastable into applications like Paint, Discord, Slack, Photoshop, and web forms.

---

Development & Contribution

Prerequisites

• Node.js (v18 or higher)
• Raycast for Windows

Build & Test Commands

# Install dependencies
npm install

# Start extension in development mode
npm run dev

# Lint source code & metadata
npm run lint

# Build production bundle
npm run build

# Recompile native binaries from C# sources (Windows)
npm run build:binaries

---

Native Binaries & Build Provenance

This extension bundles two native helper binaries in assets/bin/ to provide sub-20ms instant capture and local OCR without runtime compilation overhead:

• CaptureEngine.dll: Compiled from assets/scripts/capture.cs (Win32/GDI32/WinForms capture engine).
• ocr.exe: Compiled from assets/scripts/ocr.cs (Windows WinRT OCR CLI).

Reproducible Builds

Both binaries are compiled deterministically using standard Microsoft .NET Framework C# compiler (csc.exe) built into Windows. You can inspect the source code and rebuild them at any time:

npm run build:binaries
# or: powershell -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File assets/scripts/build.ps1

For complete compiler flags, referenced assemblies, and SHA-256 checksums, see assets/bin/README.md.

Graceful Fallback: If the binaries are absent or removed, the extension automatically falls back to executing the C# sources dynamically via PowerShell (capture.ps1 and ocr.ps1).

---

License

MIT