4 ms·

What sucks about PrintScreen (or Alt+PrintScreen)?

by nodata 12y ago

pmontra 12y ago
They don't suck, because they do well what they are designed to do. However their use cases are pretty limited in my experience. I usually don't want to capture the whole desktop or a whole window. Most of my screen captures are to report bugs in web applications I manage or to get images for analysis documents. In both cases I need only relatively small areas of the screen. I use shutter to select the area I want to capture and I save it as png. Using Print Screen or Alt Print Screen would mean to use Gimp to crop the images to their relevant areas. Too slow.
- aruggirello 12y ago
  Ksnapshot, the KDE screenshot utility has that option, and more.
- Dewie 12y ago
  Gnome screenshot (available on for example Ubuntu) lets you take a screenshot of a portion of the screen that you choose yourself (so, like taking a full screenshot and then cropping). In unity, you can press Dash, start typing screenshot and then you can choose 'choose portion' or something from the menu. (I think the command line argument is `gnome-screenshot -a`.) I agree that just pressing printscreen and then cropping in Gimp is a pain! Really, the less I have to use Gimp for simple editing, the happier I am.
  - pmontra 12y ago
    I just tried gnome-screenshot, which I didn't know about. It fails with an error after capturing an image because it seems it needs the gnome shell and I don't have it (nor unity) but from the man page it seems it's more or less functionally equivalent to shutter. There are two nice things with shutter: 1) the icon that sits in the notification area (or whatever it is called in a given DE) 2) the list of all the previous screenshots taken. They come in handy for those days when I have to capture dozen of images.
exDM69 12y ago
> What sucks about PrintScreen (or Alt+PrintScreen)? In which desktop environment? Gnome? KDE? This is not an universal shortcut in X11 or Linux in general. Instead, your environment has PrintScreen configured to launch some screenshot application which comes with the environment. Maim is an alternative to that tool. Similarly, you can configure Xhotkeys or your desktop to launch main or scrot or GraphicsMagick's import under any desktop environment or window manager.
- nodata 12y ago
  By default in Gnome.
  - exDM69 12y ago
    Yes, that would be gnome-screenshot then. This application as well as the default keybinding are specific to Gnome. gnome-screenshot is alright for the task, but OP's maim tool has some more features and it does not depend on Gnome. Lots of people who run Linux do not use fully featured desktop environments with bells and whistles but prefer a lean and mean windowing environment instead.

What sucks about PrintScreen (or Alt+PrintScreen)?

by nodata 12y ago

What sucks about PrintScreen (or Alt+PrintScreen)?

They don't suck, because they do well what they are designed to do. However their use cases are pretty limited in my experience. I usually don't want to capture the whole desktop or a whole window. Most of my screen captures are to report bugs in web applications I manage or to get images for analysis documents. In both cases I need only relatively small areas of the screen. I use shutter to select the area I want to capture and I save it as png. Using Print Screen or Alt Print Screen would mean to use Gimp to crop the images to their relevant areas. Too slow.

aruggirello 12y ago
Ksnapshot, the KDE screenshot utility has that option, and more.
Dewie 12y ago
Gnome screenshot (available on for example Ubuntu) lets you take a screenshot of a portion of the screen that you choose yourself (so, like taking a full screenshot and then cropping). In unity, you can press Dash, start typing screenshot and then you can choose 'choose portion' or something from the menu. (I think the command line argument is `gnome-screenshot -a`.) I agree that just pressing printscreen and then cropping in Gimp is a pain! Really, the less I have to use Gimp for simple editing, the happier I am.
- pmontra 12y ago
  I just tried gnome-screenshot, which I didn't know about. It fails with an error after capturing an image because it seems it needs the gnome shell and I don't have it (nor unity) but from the man page it seems it's more or less functionally equivalent to shutter. There are two nice things with shutter: 1) the icon that sits in the notification area (or whatever it is called in a given DE) 2) the list of all the previous screenshots taken. They come in handy for those days when I have to capture dozen of images.

exDM69 12y ago

> What sucks about PrintScreen (or Alt+PrintScreen)? In which desktop environment? Gnome? KDE? This is not an universal shortcut in X11 or Linux in general. Instead, your environment has PrintScreen configured to launch some screenshot application which comes with the environment. Maim is an alternative to that tool. Similarly, you can configure Xhotkeys or your desktop to launch main or scrot or GraphicsMagick's import under any desktop environment or window manager.

nodata 12y ago
By default in Gnome.
- exDM69 12y ago
  Yes, that would be gnome-screenshot then. This application as well as the default keybinding are specific to Gnome. gnome-screenshot is alright for the task, but OP's maim tool has some more features and it does not depend on Gnome. Lots of people who run Linux do not use fully featured desktop environments with bells and whistles but prefer a lean and mean windowing environment instead.