PixWit User Guide
Welcome to PixWit!
Opening the manual in the app: right-click the tray icon → Help → User Guide. Every hotkey shown with a default value, unless marked as fixed by the system, can be changed in Settings → Hotkey Settings.
🚀 Quick start
First steps
- Launch the app: PixWit starts as a slim toolbar pinned to the screen (60px wide, always on top) and keeps running in the system tray.
- Find the tray icon: bottom-right corner of the taskbar.
- Right-click it: the tray menu holds every entry point — screenshot history, Settings, Help and more.
- Try it: press F1, drag out a region, annotate it in the editor, then copy or save.
The toolbar is gone? It may have auto-hidden at the screen edge — slide the cursor over the thin strip and it comes back. Or it was hidden with the × button. Right-click the tray icon and tick Show main window. Hidden or retracted is not the same as exited: to quit, use the tray menu → Exit.
Essential hotkeys
| Hotkey | Action |
|---|---|
| F1 | Screenshot / sticky note |
| F3 | Start / stop recording |
| F4 | Pause / resume recording (only while recording) |
| Ctrl+Shift+V | Clipboard sticky |
| Ctrl+O | Text recognition (OCR) |
| Ctrl+E | Extract table |
| Ctrl+M | Extract LaTeX formula |
| Ctrl+T | Translate |
| Ctrl+I | AI insights |
| Ctrl+D | AI chat |
These are all global hotkeys you can remap in Settings → Hotkey Settings (click the × on the right to disable one). The full list is in Shortcuts.
AI works out of the box
Text recognition, translation, table extraction, AI insights and AI chat use PixWit AI by default — a cloud service that needs no API key of your own. Text recognition can also run purely on local OCR (a tiny model ships with the app, the small model downloads on demand), or through your own AI service. See Settings and the installation guide (Chinese).
📚 Guide contents
Available in English
| Page | What is inside |
|---|---|
| Introduction (this page) | What PixWit is, first steps and the full contents |
| 📸 Screenshots | Triggering and cancelling a capture, region selection, UI element detection, the toolbar, color picker, watermark, and the whole screenshot editor and annotation chapter |
| 🎥 Screen recording | Region and full-screen recording, pause and resume, live annotation, camera picture-in-picture, audio, output formats and quality |
| 🔍 Text recognition | Local and cloud OCR priority, downloading the local model, the result window and click-a-line-to-copy |
| 🌐 Image translation | Text and image translation modes, target languages and styles, editing the overlay |
| ▦⤴ Table extraction | Which service is used, the result window and pasting into Excel |
| 🎞️ Video | The video editor's trim / compress / speed / convert / dub / split tabs, plus GIF frame editing |
| ⚙️ Settings | All seven pages — General, Screenshot, Annotation, Recording, Hotkey, Saving and AI Service Config — with their defaults |
| ⌨️ Shortcuts | Every remappable global hotkey and the built-in shortcuts of each window |
| ❓ FAQ | Hotkeys, the toolbar, sticky notes, OCR, translation and recording questions |
Chinese only for now
These pages have not been translated yet — the links open the Chinese documentation.
| Page | What is inside |
|---|---|
| Feature overview | Every capability grouped by module, with all default values |
| Installation | System requirements, portable and installer editions, the first recording and the local OCR model |
| 📌 Sticky notes and clipboard | The sticky note window, its context menu, cropping, and Ctrl+Shift+V |
| 📜 Scrolling screenshot | Automatic and manual stitching, the adjustment keys, and the sticky note it produces |
| 🖼️ Images | The image viewer: crop, rotate, perspective correction, resize, annotate, convert and print |
| 🤖 AI insights | OCR first, then a language model summary, key points and suggestions |
| 💬 AI chat | Multi-turn questions with the screenshot attached, model switching and prompt templates |
| 🕒 History | Browsing, starring, searching by text, moving the save folder and the retention policy |
| 🔄 Updates and feedback | Checking for updates, the two download sources, and what to do when a download is blocked |
| 💡 Tips and tricks | Hands-on ways to work faster |
📞 Getting help
- QQ group: 1091085813
- Project home: Gitee
- Website: pixwit.cn
- Issues: Gitee Issues
Thanks for using PixWit! 🎉
Questions and suggestions are always welcome.