Create Beautiful Code Screenshots in Seconds
Code screenshots are everywhere. Twitter threads, blog posts, conference slides, Stack Overflow answers, Slack messages. A well-formatted snippet with good syntax highlighting and a clean background is immediately more readable and more shareable than a raw paste or a screenshot of your terminal.
Tools like Carbon (carbon.now.sh) popularized this format and are widely used. But they require an internet connection, they upload your code to their servers to render the screenshot, and they occasionally go down at the worst possible time. A browser-based alternative that runs offline is worth knowing about.
How to Use the Code Screenshot Tool
The Code Screenshot tool follows a simple workflow:
1. Paste your code. Drop any code snippet into the editor. The tool accepts any text, though it works best with well-formatted code.
2. Select the language. Choose from common languages including JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, Go, Rust, SQL, HTML, CSS, and more. This controls the syntax highlighting — keywords, strings, comments, and operators are all colored according to the language’s grammar.
3. Choose a theme. Several editor themes are available, including One Dark (the Atom-inspired favorite), Dracula, GitHub Light, and others. Pick whatever matches the aesthetic of wherever the screenshot will be used — dark themes for social media posts, light themes for documentation.
4. Adjust the settings. Tweak padding, border radius, line number visibility, and font size to your preference.
5. Export as PNG. One click downloads a high-resolution PNG, ready to paste into a slide deck, embed in a blog post, or attach to a pull request comment.
Customization Options
The tool gives you fine-grained control over the visual output:
Themes. The theme controls both the background color and the syntax highlighting palette. Dark themes with colored keywords are the standard for social sharing; light themes look cleaner in documentation.
Background. Beyond the editor theme itself, you can set the surrounding background color — a solid color, a gradient, or transparent. Gradient backgrounds are particularly popular for social media posts.
Padding. Controls the space between the code and the edge of the image. More padding gives the snippet room to breathe; less padding maximizes the code area in the frame.
Border radius. Rounded corners on the editor window create the “floating panel” look common in polished screenshots. Set it to zero for a clean rectangular look.
Line numbers. Toggle line numbers on or off depending on whether the specific line positions matter for your use case.
Font size. Larger fonts are more legible in presentations; smaller fonts allow more code to fit in a single screenshot.
Use Cases
Social media. Twitter and LinkedIn posts featuring code do better with a clean, visually distinct screenshot than with a raw code paste. A well-formatted snippet with a dark background stands out in a feed.
Blog posts and documentation. When you want to show a specific piece of code with precise styling rather than relying on a Markdown code block renderer, a screenshot gives you pixel-level control.
Presentations. Slides require larger fonts and clean backgrounds. The Code Screenshot tool lets you tune these exactly rather than hoping your IDE looks presentable on a projector.
Code reviews. Attaching a screenshot to a pull request comment or a code review note helps isolate exactly the section you’re discussing.
Complementary Developer Tools
Before generating your screenshot, it’s worth making sure the code itself is clean:
The Prettier Code Formatter runs Prettier in the browser and formats JavaScript, TypeScript, CSS, HTML, and Markdown with consistent style. Run your code through it before screenshotting and you get properly indented, consistently spaced output rather than whatever formatting your editor happens to have applied.
If you’re generating a screenshot to illustrate a code change, the Diff Checker lets you compare two versions of a snippet and highlights the additions, deletions, and modifications. This is useful for showing before-and-after in a blog post or documentation update.
No Signup, No Watermark, No Upload
Many code screenshot tools add a watermark to the exported image or require you to sign in to use full resolution. The Code Screenshot tool on BaconTools produces clean, unbranded PNGs with no account required and no upload of your code to any external service.
Browse all developer tools or see the full tool library.