Looking for a simple tool that lets you record a section of your screen and export it as a GIF?

Take a peek at Peek, a simple utility for doing exactly that!

Peek was built “for the specific use case of recording screen areas, e.g., for easily showing UI features of your own apps or for showing a bug in bug reports,” says the developer.

“It is not a general purpose screen cast app with extended features and it never will be.”

Peek only works with X11 and is targeted at GNOME 3. That said, it works fine on the Unity desktop so long as you don’t have Locally Integrated Menus enabled.

since this article was written so some caveats no longer apply. Peek has been updated since this article was written so some caveats no longer apply.

Note: the app does require ffmpeg to be installed.

You can download the latest release of Peek for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS directly from the project GitHub page:

Download Peek From GitHub

Alternatively, add and install from the official Peek PPA on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and above by adding the following package archive to your software sources:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:peek-developers/stable

sudo apt update && sudo apt install peek