 Some of the most common questions I get are hey DT. What are your favorite applications for this task? And some of the most common ones I get oddly enough or hey DT What is your favorite screenshot utility because screenshot applications? They're rather simple programs, right? They don't have to do much really. They only have to do about three or four different tasks They only need about three or four features for me personally to find them useful and most screenshot applications do those things So on Linux because these are again simple tools We have dozens of screenshot applications to choose from and for the most part they all do the same thing Well, not entirely the same thing. There's small differences But for the most part I could use any of them But I am going to cover some of the more common choices and some of the small differences between them because your choice in a Screenshot application will depend a lot on you how your personal needs You know, what exactly are you doing taking a screenshot? Some of it will depend on your equipment Are you using a single monitor? Are you using multi monitors? Also the software you run or are you running a specific desktop environment or window manager that could affect your choice? Are you using Xorg or Wayland for a display server that could also affect your choice? So for me personally when I run full desktop environments that have a full suite of desktop applications They will typically come with a screenshot application and whatever one they ship with is typically the one I use because again Most of them all do the same basic functions anyway So I'm not looking to go out of my way to replace it. So on Genome, for example I'll just use the Genome screenshot utility Let me switch over to my desktop here And this is a VM of Ubuntu 21 10 with the Genome desktop environment If I hit the super key and start typing for the screenshot utility here the Genome screenshot utility I like the fact that it is very very simple. Now, there are some screenshot utilities that do a lot Many screenshot utilities try to do more than what a screenshot utility really needs to do Some of them let you actually edit the photo within the screenshot utility Some of them actually let you annotate the screenshot within the screenshot utility You know add text and things like that now I don't need all of that because if I'm actually going to work on that image, you know edit that image in a major way I'm going to take a screenshot of that image, right? And then I'm going to open it and something like gimp, right? I'm going to open it in a proper image editor with all the tools I need So don't give me just a few basic tools and a screenshot utility for editing an image and thinking that's appropriate in many ways I think that's a little bit of a waste of time for those developers to add those features And I think it's a little bit of feature creep So the Genome screenshot utility is very very simple to use you can see it only really has about three or four Things you can choose from so you have the capture area screen window or selection If we choose screen it's going to take a screenshot just a standard screenshot, which is the entire Visible workspaces in front of you. So if you're on a multi-monitor system, this is very important It's going to actually take a screenshot of all three monitors For example in my case because I have three monitors if you're on a single monitor system It's just the one monitor of course, but you could also choose window now that allows you to specify a specific window Like application windows So if you had the terminal up, you know, you could actually just take a screenshot of the terminal with that output And that's very useful if you're needing to take a screenshot of specific applications doing different things like if you were a writer You were writing articles technical articles about Applications for example that is a very useful feature and one I really like is the selection tool And what this is it allows you to take a screenshot of a region or a selection of the screen You actually just draw basically a big rectangle. Hey take a screenshot of this area Now earlier when I said that every screenshot utility kind of does the same thing There are small differences, but really every screenshot utility should Allow you to take the three different screenshots that this particular tool does the screen a window or a selection And when you take a screenshot of a screen you also have the option Do you want to show the pointer the cursor or not most of the time you don't want a cursor on the screen? So that's usually turned off, but if you wanted to turn it on you could turn it on by default though That is turned off and of course you can delay in seconds How long before screenshot and that's very important because you're gonna want to add a delay sometimes for example, if I wanted to take a screenshot of me doing something in the Applications menu here in Genome. Well, I can't click take screenshot Because it's gonna immediately take the screenshot I'm not gonna have time to get into the menu and navigate to where I want to get to in the menu So I would have to delay that by a few seconds three four five seconds Maybe and then I would click take screenshot I've got five seconds to get where I wanted to get maybe this is the screen I wanted to see and you see we get a visual Confirmation with a camera flash and we get a camera flash noise as well You know some audio so we know we took the screenshot we get a preview of the screenshot We could name the screenshot anything we want I'm just gonna leave it as the default setting, which is a timestamp the folder We're gonna save it in by default here on a boon to it's gonna save it in the pictures directory in our home directory And a click save I go into the file manager go into pictures and you know I have a screenshot right here if I open it open with image viewer There is the screenshot we took I'm gonna close that out and let me close out the file manager as well Let me open the screenshot utility one more time just to show you guys the selection And if I do take screenshot you see my cursor is now at x now I just draw on the screen what I want to take a picture of maybe I want to take a picture of I don't know the top left-hand corner there I can draw And it takes that screenshot let me make that Full screen again or get out of the the dashboard there You see it shows me a preview of what we selected and again I could save that to the pictures directory so and of course the taking a screenshot of an active window Just takes a screenshot of an active window for example if I had the file manager open I would go to the screenshot utility choose window take screenshot Pick a window We had the delay going for five seconds. That's why it didn't happen immediately I forgot I had set the delay on that and then you know save that but you can see the image is a very clean image It's just the Nautilus file manager here with the rounded borders and the shadow but nothing else You know that is a very clean image again That's very important if you're writing an article or a blog about an application And you just want a very clean image of that particular application. You're working with Now I don't install good gnome Distros much on my equipment because I'm not a big fan of the gnome desktop environment But if I use gnome I would use that gnome screenshot utility but I often do install KDE plasma distributions on Some of my machines test machines and often on friends and family machines because then you know I found that new to Linux users find the KDE plasma desktop a very appealing and in KDE plasma You could have a variety of different screenshot utilities installed But typically they'll have one installed called spectacle and if I open spectacle you can see already KDE plasma You know their screenshot utility. It's a little bit different than the GNOME You can see where the GNOME tool was very simple, right? It had the big green button that said take screenshot and you had a few basic settings You know depending on what kind of screenshot you wanted to take but you didn't have much else where with this we get a preview window So it's already showing us a preview of our Basically the full screen and then once again full screen means all your monitors So if you're on a dual monitor or triple monitor is going to take a screenshot of all of your monitors in this VM Though this is a single monitor VM now We do have an option for a delay once again That could be very important if I need to delay so I have time to get into like a menu system or something before a screenshot We also have the option to include the mouse pointer or not by default The mouse pointer is not included in the screenshots because again typically you don't want that then you have the button that says Take a new screenshot, but you also have a lot of buttons down here because the KDE suite of applications They are famous for having a ton of different configuration options and settings So if I actually click the configure button, you can see spectacle Allows me to do quite a bit of stuff here We have options for whether I want to autosave the file or not What I want to do when I copy an image as far as where does it go to the clipboard? Do we copy the image to the clipboard or do we copy the file location to the clipboard? We also have some options for what the screenshot key itself does of course by default It takes a new screenshot, but it doesn't have to you could have the screenshot key Just open a new spectacle window or return focus to spectacle And if you're doing an area select, you know where you draw a rectangle on the screen to take a screenshot of a specific Region of the screen there are options for that as where whether you want to use a light background or a dark background Probably, you know when it's drawing the section on the screen You also have options for remembering the selected areas So if you select an area if you choose take a screenshot of selected area again It'll default back to the one you previously selected. So a lot of options here none of these options were in the Ganon utility We also have annotate so I could actually you know draw text on the screen or your Images arrows, you know simple shapes and things like that now for me. I I don't need any of that I actually hit the escape key thinking I would get out of the annotation, but the escape key got me out of spectacle I actually did not expect that I should mention as far as the hitting the escape key You know killed spectacle there are keyboard shortcuts for all of this There are keyboard shortcuts in both Ganon and KDE for using their screenshot applications I don't know them offhand because I don't typically use these desktop environments or these applications I do know that the Ganon screenshot utility usually has weird keyboard shortcuts It's very windows-like in the keyboard shortcuts that they choose So the screenshot utility uses a lot of the print screen key They'll all print screen control print screen and things like that to do various things and on my keyboards You guys know I use not full 110 key keyboards, right? I use much smaller keyboards that don't have a lot of Extra keys, right? It's usually just the off of numeric keys and then the standard modifier keys control all shift, right? So I can't actually use those weird key bindings Print screen as part of the key bindings is one of the complaints I have with Ganon and their keyboard shortcuts a lot of their standard keyboard shortcuts involve function keys They had just weird keys and a media keys and things like that that are not present on Many keyboards, but of course those are default key bindings. You can change them You can change them in KDE. You can change them in Ganon. Now for me I could use either the Ganon or the KDE screenshot utilities. They're fine I do have one minor gripe with them the fact that I am on a multi monitor system a triple monitor system neither Spectacle or Ganon screenshot can actually take a screenshot of one of my three monitors They don't have that ability when they have to take a screenshot of your screen or in this case Fullscreen and KDE. They're actually talking about all your screens because in traditional desktop environments However many monitors you have they're all considered one workspace and that's what they're doing They're just taking a screenshot of that one big workspace in front of you Where on like tiling window managers each monitor is its own workspace So I prefer they allow me to choose which display Monitor to actually take a screenshot because that that's one of my common things that I do in my workflow as I take screenshots of a specific monitor on my system and How I would have to get around that with Ganon or KDE with their screenshot tools is to do the region or area Select and then try to as best I can exactly draw the 1920 by 1080, you know square Exactly on the monitor I'm trying to capture which you can do that because it gives you a visual representation exactly where the square is Being drawn. So it's actually not that hard, but that's still a few seconds of effort I prefer not to be there now Let me show you a couple of screenshot applications that I find particularly useful for my workflow So this is my main production machine here We're no longer in a VM here and right now I've launched a program called flame shot flame shot is a really neat utility Even though I launched it and there's nothing on the screen It's actually a program that sits in the sys tray if I hover over that icon. That's flame shot by right click You can see I have take screenshot configuration Information that's just licensing inversion number and then of course quit Let me go into the configuration options because there are a few make this window a little smaller here You have options for interface. So this is uh coloring information because when you select a region You're going to draw a box, you know, what color do you want the box and you know various items on the screen by default? It's a purple color. We have a file name editor here So you can choose what kind of naming scheme for your screenshots I'm just going to go with the defaults and then we have the general tab here And this has options for example to show the tray icon and the sys tray Do you want flame shot to launch at startup meaning every time you log in? Do you want flame shot to automatically launch and sit in that system tray ready for use? So i'm gonna just left click on the mouse and you see I've got select an area with the mouse or press escape to exit Well, if I just select an area, maybe I want to take a quick snapshot of what's going on in my x-mobile or the panel here i'm using in x-mone n I will select the region by just you know drawing Drawing the rectangle. It tells me exactly how many pixels what the dimensions are I could resize it if I get a little wonky I did go a little too far over. I was actually a little bit on my far left monitor And yeah, I think that is right Then let me just hit enter and see flame shot info capture saved to the clipboard So by default it saved it to the clipboard. It didn't save it as a file Because typically I don't like saving my screenshots as files because I don't need them except to be captured just for an instant So I can import them usually into gimp. So I'm gonna launch gimp Gimp launches on a different workspace. It automatically takes me to that workspace And then I just do a control v to paste in gimp And you see that is that flame shot region screenshot Now there are keyboard shortcuts available with flame shot, of course You know all these screenshot utilities have keyboard shortcuts if I click on the icon again to take a region select Right this time I'm going to do a region select here of this area in gimp And instead of hitting enter and telling it hey save that to the clipboard, which is what the default is I'm going to save this as a file instead. So I'm going to do control s for save It's going to ask me where I want to save it and I just click save and it saves that Image file you see flame shot info capture saved and it tells me it saved it in the pictures directory So let me get out of gimp and I've also closed the app image version of flame shot What I'm going to do is I'm going to show you the natively installed version of flame shot here on arch linux or Arco linux is what I'm running because I don't want to have to type the full path the flame shot As far as the app image on my system So by installing the native package all I have to do is type flame shot if I do flame shot space gooey This is the graphical application of flame shot You see it's the region select where I can draw a rectangle on the screen and Choose a section of the screen to actually take a screenshot But there are other command line options. For example full screen I can tell it a dash p and then the location where to take the full screen screenshot. I'm going to take it Uh in downloads my downloads directory because I'm in the home directory So if I cd now into uh downloads to an ls Let's see if I can see where it took that that is That screenshot so let's open that i'm going to do a sxiv and then 2022 dash The time stamp and let's go ahead and enter that and you can see let me make that as full screen as I can That is The full screenshot. So that is all of my monitors all three monitors. So now let me close that cd Back into the home directory now. Remember many times. I only want to capture one monitor That's typically my workflow. I want, you know, the second of my three monitors, right? So how I would do that is I would do flame shot space Screen space and then dash in space and then the number of the monitor So if I did monitor two and then space and instead of saving it, I'll do a copy So this should copy it to the clipboard where I could then open gimp again It's kind of my workflow like making screenshots where I just take a screenshot of a certain monitor that I want to be part of a Thumbnail for example for one of my videos and then I just paste it into gimp and then, you know, work with that Monitor two actually was actually my monitor one the far left monitor because my monitor is the way they're plugged in or Out of order. I actually have to correct those with a x-rander a-rander actually So let me run that uh again in this this time do monitor number one and let's see which one that actually is Yeah, that is my obs screen. So that's the third monitor where there's only one other option for me as far as Which monitor number and let's do uh zero and then There we go Now we actually took a screenshot of the right monitor by the way went the way Xorg numbers monitors it starts at zero So monitor one is really monitor zero and then one and then two for my triple monitor So let me close all of that now. There's a whole lot more you can do with flame shot There's a lot more options more configuration options It's a really powerful tool like it literally does everything you could possibly want from a screenshot utility I don't use flame shot because I use a different command line Utility that takes screenshots and also has all the functionality that I could ever want out of a screenshot tool And that application is called maim maim Let me clear the screen and actually make this bigger So maim if I do maim dash dash help for help information There's a lot of help information. Unfortunately. I thought this would be a smaller cheat sheet But there's a lot of flags you can give maim now maim is a fork It's basically the spiritual successor to a now dead command line project that was called scrot I did a video about scrot about a year or two ago and it's still Useful I mean you can use scrot just because nobody's actively maintaining it doesn't mean the tool no longer works It works just fine But because there is an active fork of it. I would recommend using maim these days The way maim works is maim and if you wanted to take a full screen screenshot So for me multi monitors, it means all the screens. I just give it a path to You know, where do I want it to save to do a test dot ping for the name of the image? And that's it now if I wanted to I could sx IV That's my image viewer by the way download slash test dot ping and that is the screenshot it took again My triple monitor system there now if I wanted to I could rerun that Main command except this time I'm going to give it a flag dash dash Select and I'm sure you can probably figure out what that does that's going to be a region select So let me hit enter My cursor now turns to an x where I could draw on the screen I mean, maybe I wanted this Terminal here right and then my cursor comes back to a normal cursor and now let me rerun Sx IV on test dot ping and you see now it is that region select that we didn't Maim also has the ability to take a screenshot of a active window if you know the ID of the active window But even if you don't know the ID of the window you're trying to take a screenshot of You can use the x do tool to get that information for you So do maim dash I and then double quotes dollar sign and then parentheses x do tool space get active window And then the location to where you want to save that particular screenshot And of course the fish shell is complaining because it doesn't like dollar signs So this probably would have been okay in the bash shell But in the fish shell get rid of the dollar sign in front of the command And then it may also not like The quotes as well And finally the command worked and now let's open test dot ping and you see It got the active window which is the window with focus and it took the screenshot Just fine. So that last command, you know without the quotes and without the dollar sign is just for the fish shell The one that filled is the command that you actually want to run for a bash or any posix compliant shell And if you want to take a screenshot of a specific monitor, there's a variety of ways to do it There is a flag where you can specify the name of the display So you actually have to type like a display port one display port two whatever information you get from x rander The way I typically like to do it is with the dash g flag the geometry flag because I know all of my monitors are 1920 by 1080 And then I just give it specific coordinates So I do 1920 by 1080 plus zero plus zero the zero zero is a x y coordinates Of course, that's going to be my first monitor So well, we have to give it an output because we didn't specify Hey, where to save the file to download slash test dot ping once again And that should have saved A screenshot of My far left monitor. So that's how I get screenshots of just one monitor And of course doing all this at the command line. That's fine, right? That there's nothing wrong with that but for me what I do is I actually Have a d menu script. So this is this d menu script here in emacs This is actually part of my dm scripts repository over on gitlab It's a collection of probably a couple of dozen various d menu scripts And this one here is specifically for maim it basically Takes all these maim commands. For example, if I do a super p followed by i This is the d menu script You see take a screenshot of and then we have various options full screen all the monitors The active window a selected region meaning draw the rectangle take The selected region or I have the options of to taking a screenshot of one of my three monitors Whether it be display port one display port two or hdmi dash a dash zero And those are just the names assigned to those monitors from x render So if I go down here and take a screenshot of hdmi dash a dash zero I just hit enter Do I want to save that information to a file or a clipboard or to both? And again for me, I'm typically just saving this stuff to a clipboard and then now that it's in my clipboard I'm going to launch gimp Gimp should now launch on its own workspace and take me there if I do a control v to paste That is the screenshot of that particular monitor. That's my far right monitor That's currently recording in obs. Let me close gimp actually Let me not close gimp one other bonus tool I want to mention as far as the ability to make screenshots most people don't know this But you can actually use gimp as a screenshot tool if it within gimp go to file and then go to create And then you have two options from clipboard or screenshot hit screenshot And then you get some very simple options, you know similar to like the genome screenshot tool You can give it a delay You can tell it whether to include the mouse pointer or not and then click snap and watch what happens the cursor Turns to the the crosshairs here I just click on something and I just took a selection of that window and it took a screenshot of that window If I wanted to take a screenshot of the entire workspace Let me actually go into the window here and edit some things because by default it takes a screenshot of a single window But I could take a screenshot of the entire screen hit snap And there is a screenshot of my current monitor that I was on and of course you could have also Selected a region just draw a rectangle on the screen and gimp can take a screenshot that way too So if you already have gimp installed and you're one of these people that use gimp all the dang time It's always open on your system. Just know gimp can take screenshots. Just fine So there were four or five tools that take screenshots and I'm kind of familiar with that I've used and I find Okay, right. I can use any of them. I do like the more command line options For example flame shot had some command line Tools with it and of course maim is strictly a command line tool And I like that because it allows me to create my own script that d-menu script that takes screenshots for me, right? It has all the options in that d-menu script that I need It doesn't have anything extra, right? It was I designed that script for my needs And I like that where with a graphical application with a GUI application Many of these tools, especially the ones that have a ton of features Have stuff in them that I'm never going to use like spectacle had the ability to draw shapes and annotate text on my Screenshots, I don't need that, right? So with the GUI applications, many times you're stuck with extra features You don't need or the command line options. I can create my own GUI application with d-menu, for example But it only includes the stuff that works for my workflow now before I go I want to thank a few special people. I want to thank the producers of this episode Devon Gabe James, Matt Michael, Mitchell Paul, Scott West, Hakami Allen, Lennox, Ninja Chuck, Commander, Ingrid, Kurt Diocaid, David Dillon, Gregory Haiko, Kaskali, Maxim, Mike, Nitrix, Erion, Alexander, Peace, Archon, Fedor, Polytech, Ray, Red Private, Stephen, Willie, these guys They're my high steered patrons that were on Patreon without these guys This episode you just watched would not have been possible The show's also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen all these names you're seeing on the screen These are all my supporters over on patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors I'm just sponsored by you guys the community if you like my work and you want more great videos about free and open source software Please subscribe to distro tube over on patreon. All right guys peace I wonder if emacs can take a screenshot