Make Win+Shift+S paste as a file path in terminals — so Claude Code, SSH sessions, and other CLIs can read your screenshots.

On macOS, terminals like iTerm2 and tools like Claude Code handle clipboard images natively. On native Windows they can't: the terminal's stdin only accepts text. winclipshot bridges the gap — it quietly watches the clipboard, and when a screenshot is about to be pasted into a terminal it swaps the image for the file path of a saved PNG.

How it works

winclipshot doesn't change Win+Shift+S or any keybinding. It subscribes to Windows' clipboard-change events (AddClipboardFormatListener) and reacts only when a new image appears. When it does, one of three things happens:

1. Focused window is a terminal → the image is saved to a PNG file and the clipboard is replaced with the file's path. Ctrl+V pastes the path.
2. Focused window is something else, but you focus a terminal within 60 s → same conversion happens at that moment. Typical case: you screenshot a webpage in Chrome, switch to the terminal, paste.
3. Focused window is something else, you never visit a terminal → the image is left on the clipboard untouched. Pasting into Slack/Word/Chrome behaves normally.

The pending window (60 s by default, -pending flag) only polls while an undecided image is on the clipboard; the moment the clipboard changes or a terminal is focused the polling ends. Text copy/paste is never touched.

When winclipshot.exe is not running, nothing is different — Win+Shift+S and the clipboard work exactly like stock Windows.

       ┌──────────────────────────┐
       │  User: Win + Shift + S   │
       │  selects a region        │
       └────────────┬─────────────┘
                    │
                    ▼
       ┌──────────────────────────┐
       │ Windows puts the image   │
       │ on the clipboard         │
       └────────────┬─────────────┘
                    │
                    ▼
       ┌──────────────────────────┐
       │ winclipshot notified of  │
       │ clipboard change (OS     │
       │ event, not polling)      │
       └────────────┬─────────────┘
                    │
                    ▼
       ┌──────────────────────────┐
       │ Foreground window is a   │
       │ terminal?                │
       └───────┬─────────────┬────┘
            no │             │ yes
               ▼             ▼
  ┌──────────────────┐  ┌────────────────────────┐
  │ Remember as      │  │ Save PNG to %TEMP%\    │
  │ pending (60 s).  │  │  winclipshot\clip-*.png│
  │ Watch for focus  │  │ Replace clipboard with │
  │ to switch to a   │  │ the file path (text)   │
  │ terminal.        │  │                        │
  └───────┬──────────┘  └───────────┬────────────┘
          │                         │
          ▼                         │
  ┌──────────────────┐               │
  │ Terminal focused │               │
  │ within 60 s?     │               │
  └──┬───────────┬───┘               │
  no │           │ yes               │
     ▼           └─────┐             │
  (clipboard           ▼             ▼
   unchanged,    ┌──────────────────────────┐
   paste as      │ Ctrl+V in terminal →     │
   image in      │ path pasted into prompt  │
   Slack etc.)   └──────────────────────────┘

Install

1. Grab the latest winclipshot-<ver>-windows-amd64.zip (or arm64) from Releases.
2. Unzip anywhere you like — it's a single winclipshot.exe, no installer, no registry changes.
3. Double-click winclipshot.exe to run it. Leave the console window open; closing it quits the tool.

Run at sign-in (optional): press Win+R, enter shell:startup, drop a shortcut to winclipshot.exe into the folder that opens. Windows will launch it automatically every time you log in.

From source:

go install github.com/Higangssh/winclipshot@latest

Windows SmartScreen Warning

Windows SmartScreen may show "Windows protected your PC" when you first run the executable. This is a false positive — the binary is not code-signed yet, so Windows flags it as "unknown publisher."

To run anyway:

1. Click More info
2. Click Run anyway

Or unblock the file first: right-click winclipshot.exe → Properties → check Unblock at the bottom → OK.

The binary is built from public source code via GitHub Actions (workflow). VirusTotal scan reports clean across all major engines (Kaspersky, ESET, CrowdStrike, BitDefender, Avast, etc.).

Usage

Run winclipshot.exe and leave the console window open. Then use Win+Shift+S normally — the tool only reacts when a screenshot actually lands on the clipboard. Stop it with Ctrl+C or by closing the window.

Options

Default terminal list

WindowsTerminal.exe, wt.exe, conhost.exe, cmd.exe, powershell.exe, pwsh.exe, alacritty.exe, wezterm-gui.exe, mintty.exe, Hyper.exe, Tabby.exe

Need more? Use -terminals — e.g. winclipshot.exe -terminals kitty.exe,foot.exe.

Performance

winclipshot is event-driven — it blocks on AddClipboardFormatListener and wakes only when the clipboard actually changes. No polling except during the pending window (60 s max, 200 ms interval, only when a screenshot is waiting for a terminal-focus decision).

Measured on a Windows 11 laptop via winclipshot.exe -bench (200 iterations, 400 KiB payload — realistic screenshot size):

save + clipboard.Write latency
   p50          : 1.10 ms
   p95          : 2.52 ms
   p99          : 3.45 ms
   max          : 5.00 ms
working set    : 15.7 MiB
heap alloc     : 2.2 MiB

Idle CPU is effectively 0 %: the process is blocked on an OS message queue and only woken by clipboard change events. End-to-end user-perceived latency from finishing a snip to the path being on the clipboard is dominated by the 150 ms focus-settle delay we wait for Snipping Tool's overlay to close, not by the code path itself.

Run winclipshot.exe -bench on your own machine to reproduce.

FAQ

Does it interfere with normal screenshots? No. The clipboard is only rewritten when a terminal is currently focused, or when you bring a terminal to the foreground within the pending window (60 s by default). Screenshots you never carry to a terminal are left alone; pasting into Slack, Word, or an email still works.

What if I take a screenshot in Chrome, then focus a terminal just to check something, then want to paste the image into Slack? The screenshot will have been converted to a path by the time you visit the terminal. Take a new screenshot after switching to Slack, or shorten -pending if this happens often.

Where do the images go? %TEMP%\winclipshot\clip-<timestamp>.png by default. Override with -out.

Is my old clipboard content preserved? When a screenshot is redirected to a terminal, the image is replaced with the path. The previous clipboard contents are not restored — the design assumes you just took the screenshot for the terminal.

Does it collect or send anything? No network activity at all. Everything is local.

License

MIT © Sanghee Son