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Animated GIF screen recorder Peek makes it super-easy to capture a section of your screen and save it as a GIF online — but development has come to an end.
In an announcement posted on Peek’s GitHub page the application’s developer, Philipp Wolfer, explains their reasons for winding down the project, which hasn’t seen any major feature update in over 2 years.
“While I am happy the UI worked as it did, there are too many technical challenges with it that I think Peek’s UI has no future. Many of these have to do with how Wayland changed the way applications are being handled,” they write.
Peek boasts a simple UI
Detailing the specific challenges presented by the arrival of GTK4 and Wayland – challenges that are too great to overcome with Peek in its current state — Philipp concludes that the changes needed would benefit from a new project, with a new UI, and a clean slate.
Sadly, they’re something they say they have no interest in doing.
Other Linux screen recorders exist but few (that I know of) make it as easy to take short screen recording and save it as an animated GIF as Peek (though recent versions of Kooha come close).
Even so, the deprecation of Peek is definitely a loss for the wider Linux app ecosystem. It was a well-built app with an effective design that filled a gap in the market.
Still, if you are an avid Peek user you needn’t panic just yet. Current versions of the app will continue to work until they don’t.
And nothing in open source is ever truly dead. Peek’s source code is available for other developers to fork, or contribute, continue, and carry on with.
Indeed, a Python-based Peek reimplementation called PyPeek is already available. It sports a similar user-interface but adds text annotations and support for macOS and Windows.
