9 ms·

Flameshot – Simple, powerful screenshot tool for all major operating systems

323 points by VitalyAnkh 6y ago

lbill 6y ago
I just tried it, I love it! Thanks! I work in software testing: this is my new capture tool because it will save me a lot of time.
solarkraft 6y ago
> Ability to run flameshot on Sway I assume that this full wlroots-based compositor support (so Wayfire as well), which is great!
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
denysvitali 6y ago
This is AWESOME news! I really love to see how well supported Wayland nowadays is. We're probably still missing a couple of things, but so far my experience has been fantastic.
- wheybags 6y ago
  #1 problem for me is a combination of issues: - xwayland has no DPI scaling support (or rather, naive blurry pixel upscaling) - jebrains ides have no native Wayland support Result is a blurry mess of an ide. Once that is resolved, I'll be wholeheartedly aboard the Wayland train.
  - denysvitali 6y ago
    > jebrains ides have no native Wayland support I'm not sure about this statement to be honest, but maybe I never cared that much since xwayland works already good on my machines: have you tried with a custom JDK? I had some issues with sway and Jetbrains back in November, but I fixed those by running them on the latest JDK: https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/3007#issuecomment-724565702 https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/3007#issuecomment-7245... Granted that yes, probably it's not Wayland native, but using HiDPI in my case didn't seem to be a problem to be honest
    - wheybags 6y ago
      According to their bugtracker[1], there does still seem to be issues, but I hadn't looked in a while, and I'm glad to now see they plan to have it solved by end of the year \o/ 1: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JBR-1315 https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JBR-1315
- dmitrygr 6y ago
  The year was 2021: Windows was starting again to support non-x86 hardware architectures, and Microsoft was shipping the best to Linux desktop experience. Mac OS shipped with the the fastest mobile processor in the world. Android basically owned the phone market.... Linux desktop was just getting somewhat working basic screenshot support.
  - denysvitali 6y ago
    To be fair it was only Flameshot that was kind of missing Wayland support. There were / are other alternatives specifically made for Wayland: saying that the whole ecosystem was lagging behind becaude of this specific app is a bit of a stretch. But the meme is good, I'll give you that
  - michaelmrose 6y ago
    To be fair screenshoting has always worked great and a larger part of the Linux community always adopts things well before they are ready. If you don't want sort of broken stuff don't use a distro that changes major versions every 6 months.
  - marcodiego 6y ago
    The meme is good, but calling flameshot "somewhat working basic screenshot support" is an enormous understatement.
    - auganov 6y ago
      Yet, it doesn't have a proper highlighter pen. It draws a straight line and adds up. If you go over the same spot twice or more text might become unreadable and it will just look wrong. I have been unable to find a Linux screenshot tool that does it right. I use Flameshot on Linux too, but it's the least bad one in my book.
0xCAP 6y ago
Flameshot is really great, man. One of my desert island tools definitely.
Waterluvian 6y ago
Does it capture a screenshot and then you edit the still frame? Or are you drawing onto a potentially changing background?
- mgbmtl 6y ago
  Still frame. I set my print screen key to it, and works every time, instead of the built-in screenshot tool where the popups/menus will have disappeared.
valid_username 6y ago
I am not able to use it on sway with default swaybar. The notification simply says "Unable to capture screen" when I click on the tray icon. From CLI also I tried a few commands but nothing happens. No errors as well. Can you please help me?
- gideon13 6y ago
  0.9.x still has quite a few issues including not working well on scaled hidpi setups on Wayland. https://github.com/flameshot-org/flameshot/issues https://github.com/flameshot-org/flameshot/issues https://github.com/flameshot-org/flameshot/issues/1408 https://github.com/flameshot-org/flameshot/issues/1408
- libco 6y ago
  seems like xdg-desktop-portal-wlr depends on having grim installed. At least it started working for me when I installed grim edit: maybe not, is still only works sometimes
wrnr 6y ago
The auto incrementing label is very cool, im glad your enjoying yourself.
johnchristopher 6y ago
Anyone knows how to bind the printscreen key to automated flameshot screenshoting ? (using awesome/sway/thingslikethat). I'd like to emulate spectacle (kde screenshot tool) that allows a 2 seconds delay between rectangular area or application to be screenshoted.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- RealStickman_ 6y ago
  In i3 (and therefor sway) you can use bindsym. I don't know it off the top of my head, but it should be easy enough to find. The "-d" option with flameshot is used to have delays.
- _ikke_ 6y ago
  For AwesomeWM, I have this in my rc.lua in the globalkeys table: awful.key({ }, "Print", function () awful.spawn("flameshot gui") end, {description = "Make a screenshot (relies on flameshot)", group = "clipboard"})
- solarkraft 6y ago
  Tangentially related, here's my screenshot command for grim that you could easily build a sleep into: command_screenshot_interactive = grim -g "$(slurp)" - | tee $(xdg-user-dir DOCUMENTS)/screencap/$(date +%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ).png | wl-copy
edwinyzh 6y ago
Great to have discovered this nice tool! After fiddle it for a while, it doesn't seem to be able to select specific window and capture?
thibran 6y ago
This was the last essential tool needed to fully switch to Wayland.
amelius 6y ago
Will video be supported at some point?
chris_wot 6y ago
What is the best screen recorder?
- scaladev 6y ago
  OBS Studio + some mechanism to connect it to your compositor. For wlroots-based compositors like sway here's the most lightweight solution: https://hg.sr.ht/~scoopta/wlrobs https://hg.sr.ht/~scoopta/wlrobs For mutter (GNOME): https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal + pipewire
  - solarkraft 6y ago
    wlrobs has issues for me with 2 screens of different densities. With xdg-desktop-portal-wlr the Pipewire route will work as well. My favorite way to record on wlroots compositors is wf-recorder, which seems to be lighter on resources than the others. There's also a fork of SimpleScreenRecorder (with similar issues, unfortunately). Here's an overview of screencasting tools for wlroots based compositors like Sway and Wayfire: https://github.com/solarkraft/awesome-wlroots#screencasting https://github.com/solarkraft/awesome-wlroots#screencasting
DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
nice to have some alternatives to grim[1] on Sway. Guess most people won't care, however I would not want my screenshot tool to be able to access the network. [1] https://github.com/emersion/grim https://github.com/emersion/grim
bhay 6y ago
I've used Flameshot for a while and can say it is definitely the best of many tools I've tried. The direct upload to imgur is particularly nice.
- samstave 6y ago
  Is it better than Greenshot? https://i.imgur.com/ZtR60qw.png https://i.imgur.com/ZtR60qw.png I love nesting screenshots into screenshots by simply hitting the PRTSC button muliple times https://i.imgur.com/9NKvWko.png https://i.imgur.com/9NKvWko.png https://i.imgur.com/n8Mwh1Z.png https://i.imgur.com/n8Mwh1Z.png EDIT: ___ And you should also install "hoverzoom" under brave broser with multiple blockers: https://i.imgur.com/OcOJhyE.jpg https://i.imgur.com/OcOJhyE.jpg
  - stilisstuk 6y ago
    No. greenshot is fantastic. But windows only
  - stolsvik 6y ago
    Greenshot is fantastic, I would have loved it if it existed for Linux.
- tex0 6y ago
  I'm so glad. I've been looking for a decent screenshot tool on linux for ... basically forever. This is so amazing. Thank you!
- dheera 6y ago
  Yes, and the ability to annotate and block out parts of the image before saving. Simple tools that for some reason other screenshot tools have been mind-bogglingly oblivious to provide. (It has a blur tool too, but I don't recommend blurring sensitive data as if the area under the blur kernel is 1, the sum of the pixel values will be the same before and after the blur, and if an attacker recognizes which font and size it is from other parts of the screen, they use could dictionary attack for the text with the sum of the pixels as the hash to be cracked.)
- 6y ago
isitdopamine 6y ago
Don't get me wrong, Flameshot is a great tool, but this feels a bit like celebrating every turn after reinventing the wheel.
- znpy 6y ago
  it kinda is. the whole wayland ecosystem is slowling taking shape month after month. and given the radical change that wayland is, most thing have to be re-implemented using radically different tooling, libraries and approaches, which is very similar to re-inventing.
  - ajross 6y ago
    Major distros have been shipping wayland as the default backend for almost five years! I mean, yes, it's a lot of work. But it was wildly premature, and the community support for this stuff has been nothing short of a disaster of apathy and ignorance. Which is to say: what you say is true, but there's no excuse for breaking screenshots (!) for half a decade in the name of "progress". (And I say that as someone who genuinely thinks Wayland itself is great software. But the desktop projects and distros have a job to do too, and they didn't.)
    - jgillich 6y ago
      Really only Fedora has shipped Wayland by default for five years, and they do this with a lot of other tech as well (GNOME 3 and Cgroups v2 to name some more). If there is no user demand, nobody wants to do the work of supporting new technology, which is why Fedora releases things before they are ready. Anyone using Fedora should know this.
      - ajross 6y ago
        Well, yeah, but... FIVE YEARS. I mean, sure, Fedora ships bleeding edge stuff. But can you imagine a world where, I dunno, LTO or ASLR or C++ ABI changes or whatever took FIVE YEARS to stabilize and were still missing core features that the previous technology offered? I mean, no one was surprised in 2016 when Wayland landed that there would be bumps in the road. It's 2021 now!
gspr 6y ago
I don't wanna poop on their parade, but haven't Wayland screenshotters been around for a while? https://github.com/emersion/grim https://github.com/emersion/grim That one has at least been around for long enough, and has worked perfectly under Sway for long enough, that I had to look up its name because I had it bound to a hotkey and had forgotten what it was called.
- jhvkjhk 6y ago
  Reading grim’s README, it looks like a terminal tool, while flameshot is a GUI tool. You mean flameshot should just wrap grim on wayland?
  - Arnavion 6y ago
    grim can write the image to stdout. GUI like [1] can read images from stdin. You can make a script that pipes one to the other and bind that in your compositor. [1]: https://github.com/jtheoof/swappy https://github.com/jtheoof/swappy
    - ficklepickle 6y ago
      You can also use "display" from imagemagick with a pipe. Lots of people probably have that installed already.
    - jhvkjhk 6y ago
      It’s amazing to know pipe, stdin and stdout work for image, thanks!
- solarkraft 6y ago
  grim (awesome together with slurp and wl-clipboard) only works on wlroots. Flameshot aims to be cross-desktop compatible and is a GUI tool.
- thraxil 6y ago
  Same. I have a tiny script with: #!/bin/bash FILENAME="screenshot-`date +%F-%H%M%S`" grim -g "$(slurp)" ~/screenshots/$FILENAME.png Hit one key, select the region to screenshot and I have a file in that directory with a very predictable filename.
StavrosK 6y ago
Hmm, funny I should see this here after TeMPOraL mentioned it to me a few days ago. It looks much better than Shutter, which I use now. I'll try to write an IMGZ plugin for it, one-shot image upload and copying the URL to the clipboard would be fantastic.
djhworld 6y ago
I wish this tool existed on MacOS, being able to annotate screenshots in such a fluid manner was a great feature on Linux.
- flixic 6y ago
  - It supports macOS - macOS has even better tools built in - If that's not enough, try CleanShot
- seppel 6y ago
  Literally the first sentence of the linked page is "Improved MacOS support. MacOS is now officially supported and we will resolve any reported issues on this platform." However, I think build-in screenshot tools (that even can take videos) in Macos are already quite powerful. What do you miss?
  - michaelcampbell 6y ago
    I haven't looked in awhile, so maybe Mac has some of these now - immediate jump into editor after taking screenshot, with... - text annotations - arrow annotations - box/circle annotations - BLUR - upload to imgur - copy to clipboard
- evanriley 6y ago
  Shift-Command-[3,4,5]? Unless this does something that I'm not seeing, macOS has this tool builtin
roenxi 6y ago
When it says "supports Wayland" does it actually mean that Wayland upped the game to support screenshots at the protocol level, or is this all the major compositors have settled on a de-facto screenshot standard to implement in parallel to Wayland? Because I don't think, technically, it is possible for a screenshot tool to "support Wayland".
- scythe 6y ago
  According to the website, it has "experimental" support for GNOME and Plasma (KDE) on Wayland, with Sway added as of the latest version (0.9). As far as I'm aware those three account for most Wayland desktops in the wild, but maybe I'm missing something.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- solarkraft 6y ago
  There's no real standard, but something that may develop into a de-facto standard. The 3 possible ways I am aware of are: - org.gnome.Shell.Screenshot, a dbus API primarily/only used by GNOME - wlr-screencopy, a Wayland protocol extension primarily implemented by wlroots, which Sway, Wayfire and many other compositors use - xdg-desktop-portal, which is promoted by the freedesktop group and an abstraction of both APIs using special portals for each desktop, Flatpak compatible and delivering screen content via Pipewire (supported by Firefox and Chromium) Flameshot now supports the former 2, I have the most long term hope for the latter one.
  - roenxi 6y ago
    I was researching the issue and noticed wlr-screencapture. I was hoping to see it at https://github.com/wayland-project/wayland-protocols https://github.com/wayland-project/wayland-protocols too, but no luck. Thanks for the lead on xfg-desktop-portal. It is fascinating watching the near decade-long journey as Wayland tackles screenshots.
    - IshKebab 6y ago
flixic 6y ago
If you're looking for a screenshot tool for macOS, I cannot recommend CleanShot X highly enough. It in the league of its own, with scroll capture, gifs, even changing your desktop in the screenshot, but not "in reality". I'm really impressed.
- gingerlime 6y ago
  Yes. A thousand times. At our small company we trialed Jumpshare, CloudApp and a bunch of other stuff for both video and screenshots. Cleanshot was by far the best, and costs the least. Unlike most tools which are SaaSified and require a monthly subscription, CleanShot still offers a one-off license. It's a steal. The only one at our company not using Cleanshot is a developer on Linux. I think he's using Flameshot.
  - julianlam 6y ago
    > Cleanshot was by far the best, and costs the least. Unlike most tools which are SaaSified and require a monthly subscription, CleanShot still offers a one-off license. It's a steal. I just want to remark upon how strange it is Mac users are just so nonchalantly paying for bits and bobs because their OS doesn't do things they need it to do. I spent some time getting my Linux setup _just so_ and feel like I gave macOS a good go when I tried it for 11 months as a daily driver, but I just couldn't take it. Find a little niggling problem that bothers you just a little bit? Here's a program that fixes it, but it's $5. Repeat ad nauseam.
    - gingerlime 6y ago
      I've been a linux user for >10 years and switched to Mac ~4 years ago. I use, love, create, maintain and contribute to open source. Honestly, the only thing I miss from Linux is i3 (window manager). For the rest, much happier with what Mac offers. I use spectacle on MacOS, which isn't nearly as good as i3wm. It's open-source. I use a bunch of other free or open source tools for Mac. Karabiner, f.lux and lots of other tools. CleanShot is probably one of the few paid tools I have on my Mac. My company pays for it, and it's something like $20 one-off. Well worth it. I would have paid triple that if it worked on Linux. I think it's a false dichotomy that Linux == free == good and Mac == paid == bad. Also, my time is worth more to me and to my company. I feel more productive and that I waste less time fiddling on my Mac than my colleague on Linux. Perhaps it's an age thing, but I now value my time more, and prefer to fiddle only with certain things and not others. YMMV. All the power to you for using Linux!
Reventlov 6y ago
Not working completely as intended here (sway, nixos): it can take a single screenshot, and then later executions fail with those messages: http://0x0.st/-Z6n.txt http://0x0.st/-Z6n.txt I like the direct upload to imgur though.
robmsmt 6y ago
Glad this tool exists I have just moved to it. The main thing missing in my opinion to record a video as a gif.
vanous 6y ago
Using it daily, Flameshot is great! Two wishes I would love to be able to add arrows to an existing, previously arrowed+labeled screenshot, rather then having to redo it again, so the style matches. Also, adding captured screenshots to the list of recent files (in his example Nautilus) would be awesome.
- ewokone 6y ago
  Same here. Exactly my points on this great tool. Keep it up!
I_am_tiberius 6y ago
For users who like flameshot: I found ksnip even more compelling as it has more annotation features and tabs.
- ephbit 6y ago
  Anyone else here who found Shutter to be quite handy? I tried flameshot once and don't really get how one would find it more useful than Shutter.
  - I_am_tiberius 6y ago
    I think flameshot is more for people who prefer design over functionality. Although the feature set is not too bad. Does shutter have annotation features?
    - ephbit 6y ago
      If by annotation you mean arrows, numbered circles, texts, coloured boxes and so on, then yes, it has.
    - vanous 6y ago
      Is there a way to install Shutter on modern Debian? It only is available for old stable and oldoldstable. I would love to try it, but prefer function over non-function.
      - vanous 6y ago
        I tested ksnip and it is also very good, thanks HN!
elyobo 6y ago
Recently gave up on Wayland (for the moment) due to the inability to screen share most applications on Google Meet. I realise this isn't really Wayland's fault, but that doesn't really solve my problem.
- KitDuncan 6y ago
  I can share screen with pipewire on Google Meet. It's not perfect, because you can select specific windows, but it works.
  - elyobo 6y ago
    I can share some specific windows, but not the whole desktop, which ends up involving a very tedious unshare and reshare to swap back and forth between windows instead.
- vcxy 6y ago
  Agreed, this is where I'm at as well. In general, I actually found sway to be wonderful, but it's not worth the hassle of switching over anytime I have a meeting where I could possibly need to screen share.
  - elyobo 6y ago
    I had screen resolution issues with xorg at one point which Wayland resolved, but they no longer appear to be an issue and the lack of screen sharing has recently became an issue (change of responsibilities has led to more meetings requiring desktop screen sharing), so after a couple of years on Wayland I've recently jumped back to xorg.
mplanchard 6y ago
Somewhat related, does anyone know of a working screen recorder for wayland? The gnome builtin one is broken on 20.04 and 20.10. There’s a fix upstream, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to make it to the repos for a while yet
- leetrout 6y ago
  Have you tried Peek? https://github.com/phw/peek https://github.com/phw/peek
  - seanperkins 6y ago
    I also like peek.
  - lttlrck 6y ago
    it doesn't appear to support wayland https://github.com/phw/peek#why-no-native-wayland-support https://github.com/phw/peek#why-no-native-wayland-support
  - tgiba 6y ago
    Doesn't work.
- ptaken 6y ago
  Wfrecorder [0] is what I use, doesn't have a fancy gui but it just works 0: https://github.com/ammen99/wf-recorder https://github.com/ammen99/wf-recorder
- dijit 6y ago
  I use `wf-recorder`- it should work well, has worked well for me. https://github.com/ammen99/wf-recorder https://github.com/ammen99/wf-recorder
- lytedev 6y ago
  OBS should work. I believe depending on your setup, you may need to setup Pipewire.
wongarsu 6y ago
The website doesn't really make it clear, but it supports Windows, MacOS and Linux (in all flavors). Even though Windows now has a quite good screenshot story out-of-the-box with the Win+Shift+S shortcut, Flameshot seems to have some very nice annotation options that I haven't seen anywhere else.
- nguyenkien 6y ago
  ShareX is native option in Windows, support screenshot, annotation, record screen as gif or video. And can upload to many services
codethief 6y ago
Is this Wayland-only or does it also work with X and a window manager like i3?
- jcastro 6y ago
  I've been using this with X for years, great tool!
  - codethief 6y ago
    Great to know, thanks!
josteink 6y ago
Just to be clear: there exist lots of other screenshot tools which has supports Wayland, so this isn’t the first or only tool which does so. Always nice to see more tools support Wayland though. For now I’m still happy with grim and how it integrates into my swaywm setup.
Forge36 6y ago
Am I missing the hype?
zmix 6y ago
I prefer such utilities to be native to the environment (typically OS) and tightly integrated.
hojjat12000 6y ago
I started using Wayland about a month ago on both my work computer and my laptop (On Pop_OS! 20.10). After seeing too much graphical glitches and weird behavior, specially because Alacritty (my favorite terminal) did not have any window decoration (I read through the whole issue on Gnome's issue tracker for server side decoration and got a little disappointed), I stopped using it on my work PC. But still I'm using it on my laptop. I haven't had any issues there, but I just use my laptop for some web surfing and zoom. Screen capture is a hassle too. I was trying to capture only a part of my screen and had to do an hour worth of research to finally decide to just switch to X.org and get the job done. It's great that Flameshot is now supporting Wayland, and it's great that it is trying to support all the common protocols.
moneywoes 6y ago
How does this compare to ShareX
- jimmyneptune 6y ago
  ShareX is more feature-rich, but the settings are pretty convoluted. Flameshot is more easy to use and is available for Linux. I personally use ShareX on Windows and Flameshot on Linux.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
dleslie 6y ago
I like the innovation of having annotations available within the tool; but I make games, a video alternative with a timeline of annotations would be killer.
- rubee64 6y ago
  See ScreenToGif (amazing tool) https://www.screentogif.com/ https://www.screentogif.com/ EDIT: Windows-only
sgt 6y ago
Cool tool but redundant on macOS. Do screenshot using Shift-CMD-4 or 5 and edit using Preview to add arrows, text etc. I usually screenshot a part of the screen directly to the clipboard, then paste it into Mail.app where I can quickly edit it and add some text, errors, drawings etc.
- sgt 6y ago
  Forgot to mention that Ctrl-Shift-CMD-4 etc puts it directly into the clipboard. Without Ctrl, it will be saved as a file.
  - spurgu 6y ago
    I've reversed those two since I use the clipboard a lot more frequently.
- yc-kraln 6y ago
  Redundant on Win10 now, too: WIN+SHIFT+S does the same.
social_quotient 6y ago
Kinda wish this and snag it would load to s3 and put the public url in my clipboard.
humanbeinc 6y ago
Windows is not a major OS anymore apparently
- detaro 6y ago
  it runs on Windows too... Literally the second bullet point on the page is about Windows releases, would be kind of odd to list that if they didn't have Windows releases.
pricci 6y ago
Shutter is the only screenshot tool for Linux that meets my needs. But no Wayland support.
swyx 6y ago
this was submitted a month ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26113753 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26113753 i managed to build it for mac, but the dealbreaker was that text couldn't be moved. i'm sticking to Zapier's Zappy for now but even it has lacking features :( very close to writing my own...
rkagerer 6y ago
Would love to see a screenshot of that screenshot tool.

323 points by VitalyAnkh 6y ago

I just tried it, I love it! Thanks! I work in software testing: this is my new capture tool because it will save me a lot of time.

solarkraft 6y ago

> Ability to run flameshot on Sway I assume that this full wlroots-based compositor support (so Wayfire as well), which is great!

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

denysvitali 6y ago

This is AWESOME news! I really love to see how well supported Wayland nowadays is. We're probably still missing a couple of things, but so far my experience has been fantastic.

wheybags 6y ago
#1 problem for me is a combination of issues: - xwayland has no DPI scaling support (or rather, naive blurry pixel upscaling) - jebrains ides have no native Wayland support Result is a blurry mess of an ide. Once that is resolved, I'll be wholeheartedly aboard the Wayland train.
- denysvitali 6y ago
  > jebrains ides have no native Wayland support I'm not sure about this statement to be honest, but maybe I never cared that much since xwayland works already good on my machines: have you tried with a custom JDK? I had some issues with sway and Jetbrains back in November, but I fixed those by running them on the latest JDK: https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/3007#issuecomment-724565702 https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/3007#issuecomment-7245... Granted that yes, probably it's not Wayland native, but using HiDPI in my case didn't seem to be a problem to be honest
  - wheybags 6y ago
    According to their bugtracker[1], there does still seem to be issues, but I hadn't looked in a while, and I'm glad to now see they plan to have it solved by end of the year \o/ 1: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JBR-1315 https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JBR-1315
dmitrygr 6y ago
The year was 2021: Windows was starting again to support non-x86 hardware architectures, and Microsoft was shipping the best to Linux desktop experience. Mac OS shipped with the the fastest mobile processor in the world. Android basically owned the phone market.... Linux desktop was just getting somewhat working basic screenshot support.
- denysvitali 6y ago
  To be fair it was only Flameshot that was kind of missing Wayland support. There were / are other alternatives specifically made for Wayland: saying that the whole ecosystem was lagging behind becaude of this specific app is a bit of a stretch. But the meme is good, I'll give you that
- michaelmrose 6y ago
  To be fair screenshoting has always worked great and a larger part of the Linux community always adopts things well before they are ready. If you don't want sort of broken stuff don't use a distro that changes major versions every 6 months.
- marcodiego 6y ago
  The meme is good, but calling flameshot "somewhat working basic screenshot support" is an enormous understatement.
  - auganov 6y ago
    Yet, it doesn't have a proper highlighter pen. It draws a straight line and adds up. If you go over the same spot twice or more text might become unreadable and it will just look wrong. I have been unable to find a Linux screenshot tool that does it right. I use Flameshot on Linux too, but it's the least bad one in my book.

0xCAP 6y ago

Flameshot is really great, man. One of my desert island tools definitely.

Waterluvian 6y ago

Does it capture a screenshot and then you edit the still frame? Or are you drawing onto a potentially changing background?

mgbmtl 6y ago
Still frame. I set my print screen key to it, and works every time, instead of the built-in screenshot tool where the popups/menus will have disappeared.

valid_username 6y ago

I am not able to use it on sway with default swaybar. The notification simply says "Unable to capture screen" when I click on the tray icon. From CLI also I tried a few commands but nothing happens. No errors as well. Can you please help me?

gideon13 6y ago
0.9.x still has quite a few issues including not working well on scaled hidpi setups on Wayland. https://github.com/flameshot-org/flameshot/issues https://github.com/flameshot-org/flameshot/issues https://github.com/flameshot-org/flameshot/issues/1408 https://github.com/flameshot-org/flameshot/issues/1408
libco 6y ago
seems like xdg-desktop-portal-wlr depends on having grim installed. At least it started working for me when I installed grim edit: maybe not, is still only works sometimes

wrnr 6y ago

The auto incrementing label is very cool, im glad your enjoying yourself.

johnchristopher 6y ago

Anyone knows how to bind the printscreen key to automated flameshot screenshoting ? (using awesome/sway/thingslikethat). I'd like to emulate spectacle (kde screenshot tool) that allows a 2 seconds delay between rectangular area or application to be screenshoted.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
RealStickman_ 6y ago
In i3 (and therefor sway) you can use bindsym. I don't know it off the top of my head, but it should be easy enough to find. The "-d" option with flameshot is used to have delays.
_ikke_ 6y ago
For AwesomeWM, I have this in my rc.lua in the globalkeys table: awful.key({ }, "Print", function () awful.spawn("flameshot gui") end, {description = "Make a screenshot (relies on flameshot)", group = "clipboard"})
solarkraft 6y ago
Tangentially related, here's my screenshot command for grim that you could easily build a sleep into: command_screenshot_interactive = grim -g "$(slurp)" - | tee $(xdg-user-dir DOCUMENTS)/screencap/$(date +%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ).png | wl-copy

edwinyzh 6y ago

Great to have discovered this nice tool! After fiddle it for a while, it doesn't seem to be able to select specific window and capture?

thibran 6y ago

This was the last essential tool needed to fully switch to Wayland.

amelius 6y ago

Will video be supported at some point?

chris_wot 6y ago

What is the best screen recorder?

scaladev 6y ago
OBS Studio + some mechanism to connect it to your compositor. For wlroots-based compositors like sway here's the most lightweight solution: https://hg.sr.ht/~scoopta/wlrobs https://hg.sr.ht/~scoopta/wlrobs For mutter (GNOME): https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal + pipewire
- solarkraft 6y ago
  wlrobs has issues for me with 2 screens of different densities. With xdg-desktop-portal-wlr the Pipewire route will work as well. My favorite way to record on wlroots compositors is wf-recorder, which seems to be lighter on resources than the others. There's also a fork of SimpleScreenRecorder (with similar issues, unfortunately). Here's an overview of screencasting tools for wlroots based compositors like Sway and Wayfire: https://github.com/solarkraft/awesome-wlroots#screencasting https://github.com/solarkraft/awesome-wlroots#screencasting

DyslexicAtheist 6y ago

nice to have some alternatives to grim[1] on Sway. Guess most people won't care, however I would not want my screenshot tool to be able to access the network. [1] https://github.com/emersion/grim https://github.com/emersion/grim

bhay 6y ago

I've used Flameshot for a while and can say it is definitely the best of many tools I've tried. The direct upload to imgur is particularly nice.

samstave 6y ago
Is it better than Greenshot? https://i.imgur.com/ZtR60qw.png https://i.imgur.com/ZtR60qw.png I love nesting screenshots into screenshots by simply hitting the PRTSC button muliple times https://i.imgur.com/9NKvWko.png https://i.imgur.com/9NKvWko.png https://i.imgur.com/n8Mwh1Z.png https://i.imgur.com/n8Mwh1Z.png EDIT: ___ And you should also install "hoverzoom" under brave broser with multiple blockers: https://i.imgur.com/OcOJhyE.jpg https://i.imgur.com/OcOJhyE.jpg
- stilisstuk 6y ago
  No. greenshot is fantastic. But windows only
- stolsvik 6y ago
  Greenshot is fantastic, I would have loved it if it existed for Linux.
tex0 6y ago
I'm so glad. I've been looking for a decent screenshot tool on linux for ... basically forever. This is so amazing. Thank you!
dheera 6y ago
Yes, and the ability to annotate and block out parts of the image before saving. Simple tools that for some reason other screenshot tools have been mind-bogglingly oblivious to provide. (It has a blur tool too, but I don't recommend blurring sensitive data as if the area under the blur kernel is 1, the sum of the pixel values will be the same before and after the blur, and if an attacker recognizes which font and size it is from other parts of the screen, they use could dictionary attack for the text with the sum of the pixels as the hash to be cracked.)
6y ago

isitdopamine 6y ago

Don't get me wrong, Flameshot is a great tool, but this feels a bit like celebrating every turn after reinventing the wheel.

znpy 6y ago
it kinda is. the whole wayland ecosystem is slowling taking shape month after month. and given the radical change that wayland is, most thing have to be re-implemented using radically different tooling, libraries and approaches, which is very similar to re-inventing.
- ajross 6y ago
  Major distros have been shipping wayland as the default backend for almost five years! I mean, yes, it's a lot of work. But it was wildly premature, and the community support for this stuff has been nothing short of a disaster of apathy and ignorance. Which is to say: what you say is true, but there's no excuse for breaking screenshots (!) for half a decade in the name of "progress". (And I say that as someone who genuinely thinks Wayland itself is great software. But the desktop projects and distros have a job to do too, and they didn't.)
  - jgillich 6y ago
    Really only Fedora has shipped Wayland by default for five years, and they do this with a lot of other tech as well (GNOME 3 and Cgroups v2 to name some more). If there is no user demand, nobody wants to do the work of supporting new technology, which is why Fedora releases things before they are ready. Anyone using Fedora should know this.
    - ajross 6y ago
      Well, yeah, but... FIVE YEARS. I mean, sure, Fedora ships bleeding edge stuff. But can you imagine a world where, I dunno, LTO or ASLR or C++ ABI changes or whatever took FIVE YEARS to stabilize and were still missing core features that the previous technology offered? I mean, no one was surprised in 2016 when Wayland landed that there would be bumps in the road. It's 2021 now!

gspr 6y ago

I don't wanna poop on their parade, but haven't Wayland screenshotters been around for a while? https://github.com/emersion/grim https://github.com/emersion/grim That one has at least been around for long enough, and has worked perfectly under Sway for long enough, that I had to look up its name because I had it bound to a hotkey and had forgotten what it was called.

jhvkjhk 6y ago
Reading grim’s README, it looks like a terminal tool, while flameshot is a GUI tool. You mean flameshot should just wrap grim on wayland?
- Arnavion 6y ago
  grim can write the image to stdout. GUI like [1] can read images from stdin. You can make a script that pipes one to the other and bind that in your compositor. [1]: https://github.com/jtheoof/swappy https://github.com/jtheoof/swappy
  - ficklepickle 6y ago
    You can also use "display" from imagemagick with a pipe. Lots of people probably have that installed already.
  - jhvkjhk 6y ago
    It’s amazing to know pipe, stdin and stdout work for image, thanks!
solarkraft 6y ago
grim (awesome together with slurp and wl-clipboard) only works on wlroots. Flameshot aims to be cross-desktop compatible and is a GUI tool.
thraxil 6y ago
Same. I have a tiny script with: #!/bin/bash FILENAME="screenshot-`date +%F-%H%M%S`" grim -g "$(slurp)" ~/screenshots/$FILENAME.png Hit one key, select the region to screenshot and I have a file in that directory with a very predictable filename.

StavrosK 6y ago

Hmm, funny I should see this here after TeMPOraL mentioned it to me a few days ago. It looks much better than Shutter, which I use now. I'll try to write an IMGZ plugin for it, one-shot image upload and copying the URL to the clipboard would be fantastic.

djhworld 6y ago

I wish this tool existed on MacOS, being able to annotate screenshots in such a fluid manner was a great feature on Linux.

flixic 6y ago
- It supports macOS - macOS has even better tools built in - If that's not enough, try CleanShot
seppel 6y ago
Literally the first sentence of the linked page is "Improved MacOS support. MacOS is now officially supported and we will resolve any reported issues on this platform." However, I think build-in screenshot tools (that even can take videos) in Macos are already quite powerful. What do you miss?
- michaelcampbell 6y ago
  I haven't looked in awhile, so maybe Mac has some of these now - immediate jump into editor after taking screenshot, with... - text annotations - arrow annotations - box/circle annotations - BLUR - upload to imgur - copy to clipboard
evanriley 6y ago
Shift-Command-[3,4,5]? Unless this does something that I'm not seeing, macOS has this tool builtin

roenxi 6y ago

When it says "supports Wayland" does it actually mean that Wayland upped the game to support screenshots at the protocol level, or is this all the major compositors have settled on a de-facto screenshot standard to implement in parallel to Wayland? Because I don't think, technically, it is possible for a screenshot tool to "support Wayland".

scythe 6y ago
According to the website, it has "experimental" support for GNOME and Plasma (KDE) on Wayland, with Sway added as of the latest version (0.9). As far as I'm aware those three account for most Wayland desktops in the wild, but maybe I'm missing something.
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solarkraft 6y ago
There's no real standard, but something that may develop into a de-facto standard. The 3 possible ways I am aware of are: - org.gnome.Shell.Screenshot, a dbus API primarily/only used by GNOME - wlr-screencopy, a Wayland protocol extension primarily implemented by wlroots, which Sway, Wayfire and many other compositors use - xdg-desktop-portal, which is promoted by the freedesktop group and an abstraction of both APIs using special portals for each desktop, Flatpak compatible and delivering screen content via Pipewire (supported by Firefox and Chromium) Flameshot now supports the former 2, I have the most long term hope for the latter one.
- roenxi 6y ago
  I was researching the issue and noticed wlr-screencapture. I was hoping to see it at https://github.com/wayland-project/wayland-protocols https://github.com/wayland-project/wayland-protocols too, but no luck. Thanks for the lead on xfg-desktop-portal. It is fascinating watching the near decade-long journey as Wayland tackles screenshots.
  - IshKebab 6y ago

flixic 6y ago

If you're looking for a screenshot tool for macOS, I cannot recommend CleanShot X highly enough. It in the league of its own, with scroll capture, gifs, even changing your desktop in the screenshot, but not "in reality". I'm really impressed.

gingerlime 6y ago
Yes. A thousand times. At our small company we trialed Jumpshare, CloudApp and a bunch of other stuff for both video and screenshots. Cleanshot was by far the best, and costs the least. Unlike most tools which are SaaSified and require a monthly subscription, CleanShot still offers a one-off license. It's a steal. The only one at our company not using Cleanshot is a developer on Linux. I think he's using Flameshot.
- julianlam 6y ago
  > Cleanshot was by far the best, and costs the least. Unlike most tools which are SaaSified and require a monthly subscription, CleanShot still offers a one-off license. It's a steal. I just want to remark upon how strange it is Mac users are just so nonchalantly paying for bits and bobs because their OS doesn't do things they need it to do. I spent some time getting my Linux setup _just so_ and feel like I gave macOS a good go when I tried it for 11 months as a daily driver, but I just couldn't take it. Find a little niggling problem that bothers you just a little bit? Here's a program that fixes it, but it's $5. Repeat ad nauseam.
  - gingerlime 6y ago
    I've been a linux user for >10 years and switched to Mac ~4 years ago. I use, love, create, maintain and contribute to open source. Honestly, the only thing I miss from Linux is i3 (window manager). For the rest, much happier with what Mac offers. I use spectacle on MacOS, which isn't nearly as good as i3wm. It's open-source. I use a bunch of other free or open source tools for Mac. Karabiner, f.lux and lots of other tools. CleanShot is probably one of the few paid tools I have on my Mac. My company pays for it, and it's something like $20 one-off. Well worth it. I would have paid triple that if it worked on Linux. I think it's a false dichotomy that Linux == free == good and Mac == paid == bad. Also, my time is worth more to me and to my company. I feel more productive and that I waste less time fiddling on my Mac than my colleague on Linux. Perhaps it's an age thing, but I now value my time more, and prefer to fiddle only with certain things and not others. YMMV. All the power to you for using Linux!

Reventlov 6y ago

Not working completely as intended here (sway, nixos): it can take a single screenshot, and then later executions fail with those messages: http://0x0.st/-Z6n.txt http://0x0.st/-Z6n.txt I like the direct upload to imgur though.

robmsmt 6y ago

Glad this tool exists I have just moved to it. The main thing missing in my opinion to record a video as a gif.

vanous 6y ago

Using it daily, Flameshot is great! Two wishes I would love to be able to add arrows to an existing, previously arrowed+labeled screenshot, rather then having to redo it again, so the style matches. Also, adding captured screenshots to the list of recent files (in his example Nautilus) would be awesome.

ewokone 6y ago
Same here. Exactly my points on this great tool. Keep it up!

I_am_tiberius 6y ago

For users who like flameshot: I found ksnip even more compelling as it has more annotation features and tabs.

ephbit 6y ago
Anyone else here who found Shutter to be quite handy? I tried flameshot once and don't really get how one would find it more useful than Shutter.
- I_am_tiberius 6y ago
  I think flameshot is more for people who prefer design over functionality. Although the feature set is not too bad. Does shutter have annotation features?
  - ephbit 6y ago
    If by annotation you mean arrows, numbered circles, texts, coloured boxes and so on, then yes, it has.
  - vanous 6y ago
    Is there a way to install Shutter on modern Debian? It only is available for old stable and oldoldstable. I would love to try it, but prefer function over non-function.
    - vanous 6y ago
      I tested ksnip and it is also very good, thanks HN!

elyobo 6y ago

Recently gave up on Wayland (for the moment) due to the inability to screen share most applications on Google Meet. I realise this isn't really Wayland's fault, but that doesn't really solve my problem.

KitDuncan 6y ago
I can share screen with pipewire on Google Meet. It's not perfect, because you can select specific windows, but it works.
- elyobo 6y ago
  I can share some specific windows, but not the whole desktop, which ends up involving a very tedious unshare and reshare to swap back and forth between windows instead.
vcxy 6y ago
Agreed, this is where I'm at as well. In general, I actually found sway to be wonderful, but it's not worth the hassle of switching over anytime I have a meeting where I could possibly need to screen share.
- elyobo 6y ago
  I had screen resolution issues with xorg at one point which Wayland resolved, but they no longer appear to be an issue and the lack of screen sharing has recently became an issue (change of responsibilities has led to more meetings requiring desktop screen sharing), so after a couple of years on Wayland I've recently jumped back to xorg.

mplanchard 6y ago

Somewhat related, does anyone know of a working screen recorder for wayland? The gnome builtin one is broken on 20.04 and 20.10. There’s a fix upstream, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to make it to the repos for a while yet

leetrout 6y ago
Have you tried Peek? https://github.com/phw/peek https://github.com/phw/peek
- seanperkins 6y ago
  I also like peek.
- lttlrck 6y ago
  it doesn't appear to support wayland https://github.com/phw/peek#why-no-native-wayland-support https://github.com/phw/peek#why-no-native-wayland-support
- tgiba 6y ago
  Doesn't work.
ptaken 6y ago
Wfrecorder [0] is what I use, doesn't have a fancy gui but it just works 0: https://github.com/ammen99/wf-recorder https://github.com/ammen99/wf-recorder
dijit 6y ago
I use `wf-recorder`- it should work well, has worked well for me. https://github.com/ammen99/wf-recorder https://github.com/ammen99/wf-recorder
lytedev 6y ago
OBS should work. I believe depending on your setup, you may need to setup Pipewire.

wongarsu 6y ago

The website doesn't really make it clear, but it supports Windows, MacOS and Linux (in all flavors). Even though Windows now has a quite good screenshot story out-of-the-box with the Win+Shift+S shortcut, Flameshot seems to have some very nice annotation options that I haven't seen anywhere else.

nguyenkien 6y ago
ShareX is native option in Windows, support screenshot, annotation, record screen as gif or video. And can upload to many services

codethief 6y ago

Is this Wayland-only or does it also work with X and a window manager like i3?

jcastro 6y ago
I've been using this with X for years, great tool!
- codethief 6y ago
  Great to know, thanks!

josteink 6y ago

Just to be clear: there exist lots of other screenshot tools which has supports Wayland, so this isn’t the first or only tool which does so. Always nice to see more tools support Wayland though. For now I’m still happy with grim and how it integrates into my swaywm setup.

Forge36 6y ago

Am I missing the hype?

zmix 6y ago

I prefer such utilities to be native to the environment (typically OS) and tightly integrated.

hojjat12000 6y ago

I started using Wayland about a month ago on both my work computer and my laptop (On Pop_OS! 20.10). After seeing too much graphical glitches and weird behavior, specially because Alacritty (my favorite terminal) did not have any window decoration (I read through the whole issue on Gnome's issue tracker for server side decoration and got a little disappointed), I stopped using it on my work PC. But still I'm using it on my laptop. I haven't had any issues there, but I just use my laptop for some web surfing and zoom. Screen capture is a hassle too. I was trying to capture only a part of my screen and had to do an hour worth of research to finally decide to just switch to X.org and get the job done. It's great that Flameshot is now supporting Wayland, and it's great that it is trying to support all the common protocols.

moneywoes 6y ago

How does this compare to ShareX

jimmyneptune 6y ago
ShareX is more feature-rich, but the settings are pretty convoluted. Flameshot is more easy to use and is available for Linux. I personally use ShareX on Windows and Flameshot on Linux.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

dleslie 6y ago

I like the innovation of having annotations available within the tool; but I make games, a video alternative with a timeline of annotations would be killer.

rubee64 6y ago
See ScreenToGif (amazing tool) https://www.screentogif.com/ https://www.screentogif.com/ EDIT: Windows-only

sgt 6y ago

Cool tool but redundant on macOS. Do screenshot using Shift-CMD-4 or 5 and edit using Preview to add arrows, text etc. I usually screenshot a part of the screen directly to the clipboard, then paste it into Mail.app where I can quickly edit it and add some text, errors, drawings etc.

sgt 6y ago
Forgot to mention that Ctrl-Shift-CMD-4 etc puts it directly into the clipboard. Without Ctrl, it will be saved as a file.
- spurgu 6y ago
  I've reversed those two since I use the clipboard a lot more frequently.
yc-kraln 6y ago
Redundant on Win10 now, too: WIN+SHIFT+S does the same.

social_quotient 6y ago

Kinda wish this and snag it would load to s3 and put the public url in my clipboard.

humanbeinc 6y ago

Windows is not a major OS anymore apparently

detaro 6y ago
it runs on Windows too... Literally the second bullet point on the page is about Windows releases, would be kind of odd to list that if they didn't have Windows releases.

pricci 6y ago

Shutter is the only screenshot tool for Linux that meets my needs. But no Wayland support.

swyx 6y ago

this was submitted a month ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26113753 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26113753 i managed to build it for mac, but the dealbreaker was that text couldn't be moved. i'm sticking to Zapier's Zappy for now but even it has lacking features :( very close to writing my own...

rkagerer 6y ago

Would love to see a screenshot of that screenshot tool.