OpenScreen is a desktop application built for creating professional-looking screen recordings and product demos without paid subscriptions or watermarks. Designed for developers, marketers, and educators who need simple yet powerful screen capture tools, it solves the problem of expensive proprietary software by offering core recording and editing features for free. Built with Electron, React, and TypeScript, it leverages PixiJS for visual effects and dnd-timeline for intuitive editing, and is available as a native app for macOS, Windows, and Linux with full offline functionality.
The app integrates with platform-specific APIs like Electron’s desktopCapturer for screen and audio capture, supports PipeWire on Linux for system audio, and uses Vite for fast development. It exports videos in multiple resolutions and aspect ratios, and runs without cloud dependencies—making it ideal for privacy-conscious users and offline workflows.
What You Get
- Screen and Window Recording - Record your entire screen or select specific windows for focused demos.
- Automatic and Manual Zooms - Apply customizable zoom effects with adjustable depth levels to highlight UI elements.
- System and Microphone Audio Capture - Record both system audio (on macOS 13+, Windows, and Linux with PipeWire) and microphone input simultaneously.
- Video Cropping - Crop recordings to hide sensitive or irrelevant parts of the screen before export.
- Annotations (Text, Arrows, Images) - Overlay text, arrows, and images directly onto recordings to guide viewers.
- Trim and Speed Customization - Trim unwanted clip sections and adjust playback speed for specific segments of the video.
- Background Customization - Choose from wallpapers, solid colors, gradients, or custom background images for your recordings.
- Motion Blur for Pan/Zoom - Add motion blur to zoom and pan transitions for smoother, more professional visual effects.
- Multiple Export Resolutions and Aspect Ratios - Export videos in various formats optimized for YouTube, Twitter, or product websites.
Common Use Cases
- Creating SaaS product demos - A startup founder records their app’s UI with zooms and annotations to showcase features without paying for Screen Studio.
- Developing tutorial videos for documentation - A technical writer records a step-by-step guide with system audio and text callouts for their open-source project’s README.
- Recording bug reports with context - A QA engineer captures screen activity with audio to document reproducible issues and share with developers.
- Producing marketing clips for social media - A marketer exports 16:9 and 9:16 videos with custom backgrounds and speed adjustments for Instagram Reels and LinkedIn posts.
Under The Hood
Architecture
- Clean React component-based structure with clear separation between UI components and utility logic, enforcing single-responsibility principles
- Dependency injection via React context providers eliminates prop drilling and centralizes state management across deep component trees
- Design system approach using Radix UI primitives with custom wrappers ensures accessible, themable, and reusable components
- Modular directory structure with distinct boundaries for components, libraries, and contexts enhances maintainability
- Custom hooks encapsulate business logic and i18n concerns, decoupling UI from data flow and improving testability
- TypeScript interfaces provide strong typing across the entire codebase, reducing runtime errors and improving developer confidence
Tech Stack
- React 18 and Vite 5 with TypeScript, ESNext modules, and path aliases for a modern, type-safe frontend foundation
- Electron 39 with dedicated plugins for main and renderer process separation, enabling native desktop capabilities while leveraging web technologies
- UI built on Radix UI and ShadCN with Tailwind CSS 3.4, class-variance-authority, and clsx for utility-first, animated, themable styling
- Comprehensive testing stack with Vitest for unit tests and Playwright for end-to-end scenarios, covering edge cases and device behaviors
- Build pipeline orchestrated by Vite with TypeScript compilation and electron-builder for cross-platform desktop packaging
- Development workflow enforced with Husky, lint-staged, and Biome for automated formatting, linting, and pre-commit quality checks
Code Quality
- Extensive test coverage across unit, integration, and end-to-end layers, validating both core functionality and failure scenarios
- Component-driven architecture with reusable UI primitives and strong TypeScript typing ensures robustness and clarity
- Robust error handling in device and media operations with graceful fallbacks and clear state transitions
- Consistent, descriptive naming conventions across components, hooks, and utilities improve readability and onboarding
- Declarative layout and visual computation logic abstracted into pure, testable functions enhances maintainability
- Comprehensive linting and type checking enforce code consistency and prevent common bugs at development time
What Makes It Unique
- Native Electron integration enables seamless camera access with automatic fallback to browser APIs, unifying cross-platform media capture
- Custom video scrubber with animated thumb and backdrop blur delivers a tactile, high-fidelity playback experience rare in web editors
- Dynamic dark/light theming via CSS variables enables real-time theme transitions without recompilation or state rehydration
- Radix UI components extended with motion animations create native-app-like transitions in a web-based video editor
- Modular video utilities abstract complex media operations into reusable, testable units for scalable editing features
- Electron-specific drag regions implemented via native CSS properties preserve window behavior without UI framework dependencies