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Shotty makes beautiful, repeatable retina-ready screenshots of your terminal, right from your Mac terminal. Perfect for showing off your CLI tool in docs.

Hero — git log of this very repo — Above: Shotty screenshot of Shotty screenshotting git

Find your path¶

Install
Quickstart Take your first shot, in seconds.
Code screenshots Pair with bat (or any syntax highlighter) for one-liner social-media-ready code shots — no web app, no copy-paste.
Keep doc screenshots in sync Define every shot once in shotty.toml, regenerate with one command, no more manual grunt work.
Reference Every flag in CLI reference. Every key in config schema.

Under the hood¶

Each of the workflows above is built on these underlying features. Read about them when you want the full picture:

Terminal emulation — what ANSI/Unicode is supported, what isn't
Inline images — receiving and emitting iTerm2 OSC 1337 + Kitty graphics
Atomic writes & idempotency — temp + rename, refuse-non-PNG, skip-if-unchanged
--timeout and the cursor — capturing pagers and TUIs as live snapshots

What sets it apart¶

You'll find a lot of "screenshot a terminal" tools out there. Shotty's pitch isn't the rendering (though it's nice) — it's that you describe every screenshot once in shotty.toml, and one command keeps them all in sync. PNGs that decode to identical pixels are silently skipped, so file watchers stay quiet and Git stays clean. CI can fail when shots drift.

This site itself works that way. See shotty.toml in the repo for the recipe behind every image you'll see on these pages.

Not yet¶

Shotty targets line-oriented command output (ls, git, tree, bat, cargo, build logs). Full TUI apps like vim or htop use the alternate screen and absolute cursor positioning — neither is fully emulated yet. For pagers and TUI startup screens, --timeout works as a "snapshot whatever's on screen" escape hatch.