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Download and install

Pick your system. The buttons look up the newest release in your browser and download the file straight away. If your browser cannot reach GitHub, they open the releases page instead.

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Windows

Installer (.msi), 64-bit Portable zip, 64-bit

Other builds: Installer, ARM64 ยท Installer, 32-bit

  1. Run the .msi. Windows asks for administrator approval, because the program installs for all users.
  2. Windows SmartScreen may say Windows protected your PC and name an unknown publisher. The program is not code-signed. Choose More info, then Run anyway.
  3. Start Chromascope from the Start menu.

The installer adds its folder to PATH. Open a new terminal afterwards if you want to use chromascope-cli. The portable zip needs no installation: unpack it anywhere and run chromascope.exe.

macOS

Disk image (.dmg), Apple silicon and Intel Zip

  1. Open the .dmg and drag Chromascope to Applications.
  2. Start it once. macOS refuses, because the app is not notarised.
  3. Open System Settings, then Privacy & Security. Scroll down to the message about Chromascope and choose Open Anyway. On macOS 15 and later there is no right-click shortcut for this.

The command-line tools (chromascope-cli, chromascope-mcp, chromascope-engine-mcp) are in the folder Command line tools on the disk image. They are unsigned too, so macOS asks for the same approval the first time you run each one. The zip contains all four programs side by side.

Linux

Debian and Ubuntu (.deb) Fedora and openSUSE (.rpm) AppImage Archive (.tar.gz)

These are the x86_64 builds. The same four kinds of file exist for aarch64 (ARM) on the releases page.

sudo apt install ./chromascope-<version>-linux-x86_64.deb
sudo dnf install ./chromascope-<version>-linux-x86_64.rpm
chmod +x chromascope-<version>-linux-x86_64.AppImage && ./chromascope-<version>-linux-x86_64.AppImage

The AppImage needs FUSE. If it is missing, run the AppImage with --appimage-extract-and-run.

Check your download

Every release lists a file SHA256SUMS.txt. To check a file, compute its SHA-256 and compare it with the line for that file.

sha256sum chromascope-<version>-linux-x86_64.deb

On Windows use certutil -hashfile <file> SHA256.

Updates

Chromascope looks once a day for a newer release and tells you on the status bar. It never downloads or installs anything by itself. See Settings to turn this off.

Build from source

You need Rust 1.88 or newer, a C/C++ toolchain, and on Ubuntu the packages libxcb-render0-dev libxcb-shape0-dev libxcb-xfixes0-dev libxkbcommon-dev.

git clone https://github.com/chromascope-ms/chromascope.git
cd chromascope
cargo build --locked --release --bin chromascope
cargo build --locked --release --no-default-features --bin chromascope-cli
cargo build --locked --release --no-default-features --features mcp-headless --bin chromascope-engine-mcp
cargo build --locked --release --features mcp --bin chromascope-mcp

The programs are in target/release/. On Windows, close a running copy before you rebuild, or the linker cannot replace the file.