peek

Peek is a Linux screen recorder designed for one specific task: capturing a small area of your screen as an animated GIF or a silent WebM video. You place the Peek window over whatever part of the screen you want to capture, press Record, and when you stop it produces a file you can share. The interface is intentionally minimal, and the tool does not try to be a full-featured screencast application.

It is built for situations like demonstrating a UI feature in an app or capturing a bug to include in a bug report, where a short, looping animation is more useful than a long video. GIF is the primary output format because it works everywhere without a video player, though the README acknowledges that GIF files can be large and lower quality than video formats. WebM is also supported as a direct output option.

Peek runs on Linux using X11 or inside a GNOME Shell Wayland session via XWayland. It requires a few system libraries including FFmpeg and the GStreamer audio/video plugins. An optional tool called gifski can be installed alongside Peek to improve the quality of the generated GIF files. Installation is available through the official package repositories of many Linux distributions including Arch, Debian, Fedora, and others, as well as through Flatpak and as an AppImage download.

The project has been declared deprecated by its maintainer. No new features will be developed and the issue tracker has been closed. The announcement is linked from the README for anyone who wants the details. Existing releases remain available and installable, but the project is no longer actively maintained.

Peek was written in Vala, a programming language that compiles to C and is designed for building GNOME applications. It is licensed under GPL v3 or later.