What Quikap and QuikapStudio are
Two programs, one family. What each one does, why they are separate, how they talk to each other, and what stays on your computer.
Where things stand. Both programs are being built. Nothing has been released yet, and this site offers no download until a release is published. This page describes the design the programs are built to, so that the words mean the same when a release does arrive. Status says what exists today.
Quikap, the capture utility
Quikap takes captures: a still of a display, a window or a region; a scrolling or panoramic capture of something taller or wider than the screen; a screen recording with system audio, a microphone and the cursor's movements and clicks. It stays resident, small and quick, so that a hotkey is answered at once.
The one idea it is built around is the frozen screen: when you press the hotkey, Quikap freezes every display first and only then shows its overlay. What you select is cut from that frozen snapshot, not captured a second time, so a menu that was open stays open in the capture and nothing of the overlay itself ends up in it.
Quikap writes every capture to your own disk as an artifact: a folder with a manifest, the picture or recording, and, for a recording, the cursor and click telemetry kept separately from the pixels. Capture artifacts describes it.
QuikapStudio, the editor
QuikapStudio opens artifacts. It is a non-destructive editor: arrows, shapes, text, callouts, step badges, highlights, magnifier and spotlight effects, blur and pixelate, and secure redaction, on a canvas that is tiled so that a very large panorama is as easy to work with as a small screenshot. It keeps a library of what you captured, trims and splits recordings, and exports what you made.
Edits never change the original capture. A document is the original plus the layers you put on it; an export is a new file. The one deliberate exception is secure redaction, which removes the pixels it covers from an export, so that what was redacted cannot be recovered from the exported file.
Why two programs
Capture has to be instant and must not fail; editing is rich, stateful and changes often. So they are two processes and two installations. A fault in Studio does not stop a capture; a capture backend that fails does not corrupt a document. Each can be updated on its own.
They interoperate through two things only:
| What it is | What it carries | |
|---|---|---|
| The control protocol | a versioned, length-prefixed Protocol Buffers exchange over a local pipe, current user only | commands, status, progress, "an artifact is ready" |
| The artifact | a folder on disk, written in full and then renamed into place | the manifest, the pixels or the recording, the telemetry, the metadata |
Large data never travels through the protocol; it is written to disk once and referenced. The protocol and the manifest are versioned, and the two programs tell each other which versions they read and write when they connect.
What stays on your computer
Everything. There is no cloud, no account to create, no upload, no telemetry. Quikap and QuikapStudio talk to this site for three things only: updates, licenses, and, for people at Exprezoe, signing in in place of a license. Privacy lists exactly what each of those sends.
Platforms
Windows 10 and 11 (64-bit) come first. macOS (ScreenCaptureKit) and Linux (the desktop portal and PipeWire on Wayland) are designed for, with the platform-specific code kept behind explicit capability boundaries, and are not built. Nothing on this site has been shown for a platform other than the one it names.