Fast snipping tool for Windows written in pure C (Win32 + GDI+). Instant startup, multi-monitor support.
- Capture screenshot of the entire virtual screen before the overlay appears (popups/menus can be captured)
- Dark overlay with drag-to-select region (white + orange border)
- Selection is copied to the clipboard immediately
- macOS-style floating thumbnail in the bottom-right corner:
- drag it into a browser, terminal, or Explorer to drop the PNG file
- click it (or wait 10 seconds) to save the PNG to the Desktop
- Launching a new snip while a thumbnail is still floating saves the previous one to the Desktop first
- Per-monitor DPI aware
ESCcancels
Requires w64devkit (or any MinGW-w64 toolchain):
windres snip.rc -O coff -o snip.res
gcc -O2 -mwindows -o snip.exe snip.c snip.res -lgdi32 -lgdiplus -lshell32 -lole32 -luuid
installer/ builds Snip-Setup.exe (NSIS 3.x). It installs per user - no UAC prompt - into %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\Snip, and adds a Start Menu shortcut plus an entry in Apps & features:
installer\build_installer.bat
The Components page offers Pin to the taskbar, checked by default. The pin goes through the shell's hidden taskbarpin verb (installer/pin_taskbar.c, extracted to a temp dir at install time) and is verified by looking for the shortcut in %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch\User Pinned\TaskBar:
- Windows 10 - the verb is available and Snip is pinned during setup.
- Windows 11 - Windows removed the verb from the shell menu, and
ShellExecuteEx("taskbarpin")reports success while doing nothing. The installer detects this (helper exit code 3) and shows the manual steps instead of claiming success: Start menu -> search "Snip" -> right-click -> Pin to taskbar.
The uninstaller removes the pin only when setup created it (tracked in HKCU\Software\Snip\PinnedToTaskbar), so a pin you made yourself is left alone.
Run snip.exe, drag to select an area, then either grab the floating thumbnail to drop it somewhere or let it auto-save to the Desktop.