See it. Mark it.
Send it.
Xenocept is the desktop screen capture and annotation tool built for the AI era. Hit a hotkey to freeze your screen, mark up any region with drawings and comments, and deliver a structured snapshot to your agent, your team, or any workflow you can configure.
Sound familiar?
- Pasting
Screenshot_2026-05-15_at_3.47.21_PM.pnginto a chat and typing "see the button on the right" - Telling your AI agent to "fix the spacing" and watching it guess
- Three apps open just to capture, annotate, and share a single bug
- Bug reports that lose half their context the moment they leave your screen
- Design feedback scattered across Slack threads, sticky notes, and "did you see my comment?"
Your screen has the answer. Xenocept gets it where it needs to go.
How It Works
Capture
Press a global hotkey from anywhere. Your screen freezes instantly and Xenocept's annotation overlay drops in. No app to launch, no window to find — Xenocept lives in your system tray and is always ready.
Ctrl + ` → screen freezes, overlay appearsAnnotate
Click-drag to mark any region of interest. Draw, box, circle, arrow, blur out sensitive bits, and attach a written description. Stack as many comments as you need across the frozen screen — every one becomes part of the same session.
Comment, comment, comment — build up the picture, no rush.Submit
Hit Submit. Xenocept bundles every comment, image, and description into a structured snapshot and delivers it to whatever consumer you've configured — an AI agent over MCP, a webhook, a file your tooling watches, or a custom plugin. One tool, every workflow.
# Snapshot JSON delivered to your configured consumer
{ "snapshot_id": "...", "comments": [ ... ], "workspace": "..." }Built For Your Workflow
AI Agent Feedback
Stop describing what your agent should fix. Show it. Snapshots stream over MCP, HTTP, or IPC straight into Claude, Codex, or whatever you're driving — with the exact pixels and the exact instructions in one structured payload.
QA & Bug Reports
One hotkey, one session, one Submit. Every report carries the screenshot, the annotation, the description, and the metadata your tracker needs — automatically attached, never lost in translation.
Customer Support
Walk customers through issues without "can you screenshot that?" loops. Capture both sides of a screen-share session and deliver structured, redacted snapshots into your help-desk pipeline.
Design Reviews
Markup a Figma frame, a live site, or a prototype. Comments stay attached to the regions they describe — reviewers can see, at a glance, exactly which pixel the note refers to.
Developer Workflows
Wire snapshots into anything — a webhook, a file your tooling watches, a custom plugin. Build your own adapter against a stable JSON schema and pipe visual feedback into the rest of your stack.
Documentation
Capture screenshots with the annotations already drawn on. Snapshots persist locally, are content-addressed, and dedupe identical pixels — your docs library stays slim and searchable.
Education & Tutorials
Build lessons by capturing real workflows and annotating them inline. Every step becomes a snapshot — searchable, versionable, replayable.
Nonprofits & Solo Builders
Free for organizations under $2M/year. Full feature set, no nags, no usage cap. We're a small family team building this in the open — donations are always welcome but never required.
Under The Hood
Snappy, intuitive, never annoying. Powerful features that stay out of your way.
Global Hotkey, System Tray
Always-on background process, zero startup latency. A single hotkey from anywhere on your machine drops the overlay onto the active monitor and freezes the frame instantly.
Freeze-Frame Capture
Native platform screen capture (PipeWire/X11 on Linux, ScreenCaptureKit on macOS, DXGI on Windows) gives Xenocept direct pixel-buffer access. The screen freezes underneath you so you can mark up moving UIs without chasing them.
Annotation Toolkit
Pencil, eraser, box, circle, arrows, lines, text, and a heavy-blur tool for redacting sensitive info. Every operation pushes to an undo stack with a PNG checkpoint behind it.
Comment Workflow
Click-drag to capture a region. Annotate inside it. Attach a written description. Move on. Each comment becomes a discrete object in the session — the primary unit of feedback.
Pluggable Delivery
Snapshots ship to a configurable consumer: HTTP webhook, MCP, IPC, WebSocket, file append, or a JavaScript plugin. Preconfigured adapters for Claude, Codex, and filesystem targets ship out of the box.
AeorDB-Backed Storage
Powered by AeorDB — a content-addressed, single-file embedded database. Identical PNG chunks dedupe automatically, snapshots version for free, and live SSE events power the UI without a refresh loop.
Snapshot Browsing & Search
Every submitted snapshot is persisted locally and indexed. Browse the history through the built-in UI, filter by date or status, and fuzzy-search through every comment description you've ever written.
Screenshot Stack
Every hotkey press pushes a new screenshot onto the stack. Click any thumbnail to swap the background underneath your annotations — markups are a separate layer and never get lost when you change frames.
Workspaces
Mark a rectangular region of interest — a browser window, a design tool, a single monitor — and Xenocept freezes only what matters. Eight grab handles, hover-aware cursors, and persistent across the session.
Esc-Safe Sessions
Session state persists until you hit Submit. Esc dismisses the overlay without losing a thing — comments, undo history, workspace, all preserved. Hit the hotkey again, you're right back where you left off.
JavaScript Plugin System
Subscribe to events like snapshot:submitted from a JS plugin and do whatever you want — upload to a service, transform the payload, fan out to multiple destinations. The tool is yours.
Vanilla Web Stack
Tauri shell, native Rust backend, vanilla WebComponents on the frontend. No framework lock-in, no build-step bloat. A single binary you can audit, theme, and extend.
Simple, Fair Licensing
Free for most teams. A small per-user fee for larger organizations. We're a small family team — donations are warmly welcomed at any tier.
Community
Free — forever
For organizations under $2M/year in gross revenue. Full product, all features, self-hosted. No feature gates, no time limits.
Love it? Chip in a few bucks — we're a tiny family team and every contribution helps.
Commercial
$1/mo per user
For organizations over $2M/year. Includes license compliance, email support, and priority bug fixes. Pay for who actually uses Xenocept — no per-instance gotchas.
Enterprise
Contact us
Custom SLAs, dedicated support, consulting, and training. Tailored to your organization's needs.
Frequently Asked Questions
What platforms does Xenocept run on?
Linux first (X11 and Wayland), with macOS and Windows builds following. Built on Tauri, so the desktop footprint stays small. The capture layer uses native APIs on each platform for direct pixel-buffer access.
Who is Xenocept for?
Anyone whose work involves explaining what's on their screen — developers driving AI agents, QA teams filing bugs, support folks walking through issues, designers reviewing prototypes, and educators building tutorials.
Where do my snapshots actually go?
Wherever you decide. Each snapshot is delivered to a configured consumer — an HTTP webhook, an MCP-compatible AI agent, a local IPC socket, a file your tooling watches, or a JavaScript plugin you write yourself. Xenocept ships preconfigured adapters for common targets.
Are my snapshots stored locally?
Yes. Every submitted snapshot is persisted locally in a content-addressed AeorDB store under your control. Delivery to an external consumer is a side effect — the snapshot stays browseable, searchable, and yours.
Is Xenocept open source?
Xenocept is source-available under the Business Source License 1.1 (BSL). Every version converts to Apache 2.0 (fully open source) four years after release. You can read, audit, modify, and fork the code today.
Can I use it for free?
Yes. If your organization's gross annual revenue is under $2M, Xenocept is free to use in production — all features, no limits, no nags. Individuals, nonprofits, and startups are covered without paperwork. We're a small family team, though, so if Xenocept helps you and you'd like to chip in, donations are always welcome.
What requires a commercial license?
Organizations over $2M/year in gross revenue pay $1/mo per user — flat, fair, no per-instance gotchas. Offering Xenocept as a managed service to third parties or building a competing product derived from Xenocept's source also requires a commercial agreement.
Can I write my own delivery adapter?
Absolutely. The snapshot JSON schema is stable and documented. Write a JavaScript plugin or any external service that consumes the configured endpoint — Xenocept is intentionally workflow-agnostic.
Get Started in 60 Seconds
Single download. Sits in your tray. Hotkey ready.
Download
Early-access dev builds for Linux, macOS, and Windows. One file per platform — no installer, no dependencies.
If you find any bugs, issues, or have any features you'd like to request, we'd love to hear from you! Please contact us here.
Run It
Launch once. Xenocept registers its global hotkey, drops an icon in your system tray, and disappears. No window to manage, no daemon to babysit — it's ready when you are.
./xenocept # Linux/macOS — singleton, sits in the tray
xenocept.exe # Windows — same ideaPress The Hotkey
Anywhere on your machine — your IDE, your browser, a video call — hit the hotkey. Your screen freezes and the annotation overlay drops in. Nothing in your workflow has to move out of the way.
Ctrl + ` # default — fully configurableAnnotate & Comment
Click-drag to mark a region. Draw on it, box it, blur out anything sensitive, type a description. Add more comments across the frozen screen — every one becomes part of the session. Hit Esc anytime; your work persists until Submit.
Submit
Xenocept packages your comments into a structured snapshot and delivers it to the consumer you configured — your AI agent, a webhook, a file your tooling watches, or a custom plugin. The session clears. You're ready for the next one.
Screenshots can be configured to be saved to any location on your hard drive — including multiple locations at once.
Want to go deeper? The full documentation covers consumers, plugins, configuration, the snapshot schema, and the AeorDB-backed storage layout.