grim(1)

grim1

Grab images from a wayland compositor

Usage

grim [options ...] [output-file]

Overview

grim is a command-line utility to take screenshots of Wayland desktops. For now it requires support for the screencopy protocol to work. Support for the xdg-output protocol is optional, but improves fractional scaling support.

grim will write an image to output-file, or to a timestamped file name in $GRIM_DEFAULT_DIR if not specified. If $GRIM_DEFAULT_DIR is not set, it falls back first to $XDG_PICTURES_DIR and then to the current working directory. If output-file is -, grim will write the image to the standard output instead.

Options

-h

Show help message and quit.

-s <factor>

Set the output image's scale factor to factor. By default, the scale factor is set to the highest of all outputs.

-g "<x>,<y> <width>x<height>"

Set the region to capture, in layout coordinates.

If set to -, read the region from the standard input instead.

-t <type>

Set the output image's file format to type. By default, the filetype is set to png, valid values are png, jpeg or ppm.

-q <quality>

Set the output jpeg's filetype compression rate to quality. By default, the jpeg quality is 80, valid values are between 0-100.

-l <level>

Set the output PNG's filetype compression level to level. By default, the PNG compression level is 6 on a scale from 0 to 9. Level 9 gives the highest compression ratio, but may be slow; level 1 gives a lower compression ratio, but is faster. Level 0 does no compression at all, and produces very large files; it can be useful when grim is used in a pipeline with other commands.

-o <output>

Set the output name to capture.

-c

Include cursors in the screenshot.

-T <identifier>

Set the identifier of a foreign toplevel handle to capture.

Releases

5 releases since Debian 10 (Buster); the text changed 4 times.

  1. 10
  2. 11
  3. 12
  4. 13
  5. Arch

-T since Arch Linux 2026-11-01; -l since Debian 12 (Bookworm).

Authors

Maintained by Simon Ser <[email protected]>, who is assisted by other open-source contributors. For more information about grim development, see <https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/emersion/grim>.

From grim 1.5.0-2 in Arch Linux 2026-11-01. Parsed by carta from the page's man source.