justinfrankel/licecap

LICEcap is a desktop application for recording a portion of your screen and saving it as an animated GIF. You draw a rectangle over the area you want to capture, press record, perform whatever you want to demonstrate, and then press stop. The result is a GIF file that loops indefinitely and can be shared anywhere images are accepted, with no video player required. The tool runs on Windows and macOS. It is designed to be lightweight: on macOS it runs as a standalone application, and on Windows it runs directly as an executable without a traditional installer. GIF is a widely supported format that works in email clients, chat apps, GitHub issues and pull requests, documentation sites, and web browsers without special software. The most common use case is creating quick demonstrations for technical communication. Because GIF files can be embedded directly into GitHub issues and pull requests, developers often use LICEcap to show what a bug looks like visually or to document a UI change without needing to attach a video file or write a long text description. Teams writing documentation also use it to create simple how-to animations. LICEcap is written in C, which keeps the application small and fast compared to screen recording tools that output video. Output file size depends on recording length and the amount of color variation in the captured area, so simple UI demonstrations tend to produce compact files. No README is included in this repository, so build instructions and configuration options are not available from the source shown here.