Spectacle: capture windows in separate layers

Brainstorm
1

I just stumbled[1] across this post:

Acorn 8, a graphic app, has a delightful screenshotting feature parked under ⌘⇧7 that does something incredible: it takes a screenshot, but does so in a way where windows are separate layers, grouped by app. It’s amazing; you can re-compose stuff afterwards, reveal covered stuff, remove windows, even change the wallpaper. A mouse cursor arrives too in its own tiny layer, like a cherry on top.

That sounds awesome and totally useful! Now that Spectacle is able to skip some windows when screenshotting on Wayland, is something like this somewhere in reach for Spectacle?

What could the output format be? PNG files don’t support layers, so maybe it could be XCF (for Gimp)?

  1. via Chris Coyier ↩︎

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Yeah that’s pretty cool. I’ve been dreaming of having something vaguely similar where when you do window capture you can click one of the windows from the fullscreen capture UI with highlights as you hover over windows, but I don’t have a way to do that on Wayland. The thing Acorn does is actually even better in a number of ways, but I’d need to make a major overhaul to Spectacle’s annotation system to support layers and it’s still not something I can actually do on Wayland. There are probably also a hundred complications when using multi-screen, multi-scale setups. IIRC, Mac does not support multi-scale setups.

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