Panda Screenshot

Panda Screenshot is a local screenshot capture and annotation app. It ships as a single self-contained binary — the server, web app, and Chrome extension are all bundled in.

Install

macOS / Linux

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ralphite/panda/main/install.sh | sh

Windows (PowerShell)

irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ralphite/panda/main/install.ps1 | iex

The installer asks where to keep data (default ~/panda, or %LocalAppData%\Panda on Windows), puts a panda command on your PATH, writes the Chrome extension into <data>/extension, optionally enables auto-start (launch at login + restart on crash), then runs Panda in the background and opens http://localhost:8088/screenshot. It finishes by printing the steps to load the Chrome extension.

Run panda any time to start it again.

Chrome Extension

1. Open chrome://extensions.
2. Enable Developer Mode.
3. Load unpacked from the extension folder in your data directory (the installer prints the path), or from extension/ in this repo when developing.
4. Keep Panda running on http://localhost:8088.
5. Click the extension icon on any normal page. It captures the visible viewport, opens a crop tab before the source tab, uploads the crop, then replaces that tab with the web editor.
6. Press Ctrl+Shift+P to trigger the same visible viewport capture from the keyboard.
7. Right click the extension icon and choose Full-page Screenshot when you need the old full-page capture flow.

Temporary captures live in Chrome extension IndexedDB. They are removed after upload, when the crop tab is closed, and after 30 minutes.

Keyboard

• V select
• R rectangle
• O oval
• L line
• A arrow
• P pencil
• T text
• Enter insert a newline while typing text
• Esc finish typing text
• Delete remove selection
• C copy annotated image

Develop

npm --prefix web install
npm --prefix web run build
go run ./cmd/panda

Open http://localhost:8088/screenshot. The frontend must be built before the Go binary, since it is embedded at compile time.

Other targets: make build (single binary), make test (web + Go tests), make release (cross-compile every platform into dist/).

Flags: -data <dir> overrides the data folder; -web <dir> serves the frontend from disk instead of the embedded build, for live frontend work.