Screen capture

Related articles

• Key binding

This article lists and describes screenshot and screencast software.

Screenshot software

Dedicated software

• Deepin Screenshot — Quite easy-to-use screenshot tool. Features: global hotkey to trigger screenshot tool, take screenshot of a selected area, easy to add text and line drawings onto the screenshot. Python/Qt5 based.

https://www.deepin.org/en/original/deepin-screenshot/ || deepin-screenshot

• Escrotum — Screen capture using pygtk, inspired by scrot.

https://github.com/Roger/escrotum || escrotum-git^AUR

• Flameshot — Qt5 based software for interactive screenshot taking. Select the desired area, draw with different tools and enjoy the customization capabilities.

https://github.com/lupoDharkael/flameshot || flameshot

• GNOME Screenshot — Screenshot tool for the GNOME desktop.

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-screenshot/ || gnome-screenshot

• grim — Grab images from a Wayland compositor. It currently works on Sway 1.0 alpha.

https://github.com/emersion/grim || grim-git^AUR

• gscreenshot — Simple GTK+ screenshot utility with delays, selection, and copy-to-clipboard functionality.

https://github.com/thenaterhood/gscreenshot || gscreenshot^AUR

• imgur-screenshot — Take screenshot selection, upload to imgur. + more cool things

https://github.com/jomo/imgur-screenshot || imgur-screenshot-git^AUR

• KShare — ShareX inspired cross platform utility written with Qt.

https://kshare.arsenarsen.com || kshare^AUR

• Lightscreen — Simple tool to automate the tedious process of saving and cataloging screenshots, it operates as a hidden background process that is invoked with one (or multiple) hotkeys and then saves a screenshot file to disk according to the user's preferences.

http://lightscreen.com.ar || lightscreen^AUR

• LXQt Screenshot — Screenshot tool for LXQt. Run with lximage-qt --screenshot.

https://github.com/lxde/lximage-qt || lximage-qt

• maim — Simple command line utility that takes screenshots. It's meant to replace scrot and performs better than scrot in many ways.

https://github.com/naelstrof/maim || maim

• MATE Screenshot — Screenshot tool for the MATE desktop.

http://mate-desktop.org || mate-utils

• ScreenCloud — Take a screenshot of the entire screen or to select an area and then uploading the screenshot to imgur+auth. has plugins and system tray.

http://screencloud.net/ || screencloud^AUR

• ScreenGrab — Cross-platform application designed to quickly take screenshots (Qt).

https://github.com/DOOMer/screengrab || screengrab^AUR

• Scrot — Simple command-line screenshot utility for X.

http://freecode.com/projects/scrot || scrot

• Shutter — Rich screenshot and editing program. Supports delay.

http://shutter-project.org/ || shutter^AUR

• Spectacle — KDE application for taking screenshots. It is capable of capturing images of the whole desktop, a single window, a section of a window, a selected rectangular region or a freehand region. Part of kdegraphics.

https://github.com/KDE/spectacle/ || spectacle

• Xfce4 Screenshooter — Application and Xfce4 panel plugin to take screenshots about the entire screen, the active window or a selected region. Part of xfce4-goodies.

http://goodies.xfce.org/projects/applications/xfce4-screenshooter || xfce4-screenshooter

• xwd — X Window System image dumping utility

https://www.x.org/ || xorg-xwd

xwd

xwd(1) provided by xorg-xwd

Take a screenshot of the root window:

$ xwd -root -out screenshot.xwd

Note: The methods for taking shots of active windows with import can also be used with xwd.

scrot

scrot enables taking screenshots from the CLI and offers features such as a user-definable time delay. Unless instructed otherwise, it saves the file in the current working directory.

$ scrot -t 20 -d 5

The above command saves a dated .png file, along with a thumbnail (20% of original), for Web posting. It provides a 5 second delay before capturing in this instance.

You can also use standard date and time formatting when saving to a file. e.g.,

$ scrot ~/screenshots/%Y-%m-%d-%T-screenshot.png

saves the screenshot in a filename with the current year, month, date, hours, minutes, and seconds to a folder in your home directory called "screenshots"

See scrot(1) for more information. You can simply automate the file to uploaded like so [1].

Note: In some window managers (dwm^AUR, xmonad and possibly others) scrot -s does not work properly when running via window manager's keyboard shortcut, this can be worked around by prepending scrot invocation with a short pause sleep 0.2; scrot -s.

escrotum

escrotum-git^AUR screen capture using pygtk, inspired by scrot

Created because scrot has glitches when selection mode is used with refreshing windows.

Because the command line interface its almost the same as scrot, can be used as a replacement of it.

maim

maim is aimed to be an improved scrot.

Takes screenshots of your desktop using slop for regions. It's meant to overcome shortcomings of scrot.

Flameshot

flameshot allows you to add simple shapes to your screenshot as you are taking it (either fullscreen or a selected region).

Desktop environment specific

Spectacle

If you use KDE, you might want to use Spectacle.

Spectacle is provided by the spectacle.

Xfce Screenshooter

If you use Xfce you can install xfce4-screenshooter and then add a keyboard binding:

Xfce Menu > Settings > Keyboard > Application Shortcuts

If you want to skip the Screenshot prompt, type $ xfce4-screenshooter -h in terminal for the options.

GNOME

GNOME users can press Prnt Scr or Apps > Accessories > Take Screenshot. You may need to install gnome-screenshot.

Cinnamon

The default installation of Cinnamon does not provide a screenshot utility. Installing gnome-screenshot will enable screenshots through the Menu > Accessories > Screenshot or by pressing Prnt Scr.

Other desktop environments or window managers

For other desktop environments such as LXDE or window managers such as Openbox and Compiz, one can add the above commands to the hotkey to take the screenshot. For example,

$ import -window root ~/Pictures/$(date '+%Y%m%d-%H%M%S').png

Adding the above command to the Prnt Scr key to Compiz allows to take the screenshot to the Pictures folder according to date and time. Notice that the rc.xml file in Openbox does not understand commas; so, in order to bind that command to the Prnt Scr key in Openbox, you need to add the following to the keyboard section of your rc.xml file:

rc.xml

<!-- Screenshot -->
    <keybind key="Print">
      <action name="Execute">
        <command>sh -c "import -window root ~/Pictures/$(date '+%Y%m%d-%H%M%S').png"</command>
      </action>
    </keybind>

If the Print above does not work, see Extra keyboard keys and use different keysym or keycode.

Packages including a screenshot utility

ImageMagick/GraphicsMagick

See ImageMagick#Screenshot taking.

GIMP

You also can take screenshots with GIMP (File > Create > Screenshot...).

imlib2

imlib2 provides a binary imlib2_grab to take screenshots. To take a screenshot of the full screen, type:

$ imlib2_grab screenshot.png

Note that scrot actually uses imlib2.

FFmpeg

See FFmpeg#Screen capture.

Screencast software

See also FFmpeg#Screen capture and Wikipedia:Comparison of screencasting software.

Screencast utilities allow you to create a video of your desktop or individual windows.

• Byzanz — Simple screencast tool that produces GIF animations.

https://blogs.gnome.org/otte/2009/08/30/byzanz-0-2-0/ || byzanz

• Deepin Screen Recorder — Screen recorder application for Deepin desktop.

https://www.deepin.org/en/original/deepin-screen-recorder/ || deepin-screen-recorder

• FFcast — FFmpeg-based screencast tool written in Bash.

https://github.com/lolilolicon/FFcast || ffcast^AUR

• Green Recorder — Simple yet functional desktop recorder for Linux systems.

https://github.com/green-project/green-recorder || green-recorder^AUR

• Kazam — Screencasting program with design in mind. Handles multiscreen setups.

https://launchpad.net/kazam || kazam^AUR

• OBS — Video recording and live streaming application.

https://obsproject.com/ || obs-studio

• Peek — Simple screencast tool that produces GIF, APNG, WebM or MP4 animations.

https://github.com/phw/peek || peek

• RecordItNow — Plugin based desktop recorder for KDE.

http://recorditnow.sourceforge.net/ || recorditnow^AUR

• RecordMyDesktop — Easy to use utility that records your desktop into the ogg format with a CLI, GTK+ or Qt interface. (inactive development)

http://recordmydesktop.sourceforge.net/ || CLI: recordmydesktop, GTK+: gtk-recordmydesktop, Qt: qt-recordmydesktop^AUR

• SimpleScreenRecorder — Feature-rich screen recorder written in C++/Qt5 that supports X11 and OpenGL.

http://www.maartenbaert.be/simplescreenrecorder/ || simplescreenrecorder

• VokoScreen — Simple screencast GUI tool using FFmpeg.

http://www.kohaupt-online.de/hp || vokoscreen^AUR

• XVidCap — Application used for recording a screencast or digital recording of an X Window System screen output with an audio narration.

http://xvidcap.sourceforge.net/ || xvidcap^AUR

Weston

In the Weston Wayland compositor, screenshots can be taking by pressing Super+s, which are stored in Weston's current working directory. Screencasts are also supported; recording is started and stopped by pressing Super+r, which will create a file called capture.wcap in Weston's current working directory. The capture can be decoded to YUV format by running wcap-decode --yuv4mpeg2 capture.wcap; the output of this command can be written to a file or piped into FFmpeg for further processing.

Terminal

Capture with ANSI codes

You can use the script(1) command, part of the util-linux package. Just run script and from that moment, all the output is going to be saved to the typescript file, including the ANSI codes.

Once you are done, just run exit and the typescript would ready. The resulting file can be converted to HTML using the ansi2html^AUR package, from the AUR.

To convert the typescript file to typescript.html, do the following:

$ ansi2html --bg=dark < typescript > typescript.html

Actually, some commands can be piped directly to ansi2html:

$ ls --color|ansi2html --bg=dark >output.html

That does not work on every single case, so in those cases, using script is mandatory.

Framebuffer

Install a framebuffer and use fbgrab or fbdump to take a screenshot.

Virtual console

If you merely want to capture the text in the console and not an actual image, you can use setterm, which is part of the util-linux package. The following command will dump the textual contents of virtual console 1 to a file screen.dump in the current directory:

# setterm -dump 1 -file screen.dump

Root permission is needed because the contents of /dev/vcs1 need to be read.