Difference between revisions of "Taking a screenshot"

Revision as of 07:35, 3 January 2013

import

An easy way to take a screenshot of your current system is using the import command:

import -window root screenshot.jpg

import is part of the imagemagick package.

Running import without the -window option allows selecting a window or an arbitrary region interactively.

Screenshot of multiple X screens

If you run twinview or dualhead, simply take the screenshot twice and use imagemagick to paste them together:

import -window root -display :0.0 -screen /tmp/0.png
import -window root -display :0.1 -screen /tmp/1.png
convert +append /tmp/0.png /tmp/1.png screenshot.png
rm /tmp/{0,1}.png

Screenshot of individual Xinerama heads

Xinerama-based multi-head setups have only one virtual screen. If the physical screens are different in height, you will find dead space in the screenshot. In this case, you may want to take screenshot of each physical screen individually. As long as Xinerama information is available from the X server, the following will work:

 #!/bin/bash
 xdpyinfo -ext XINERAMA | sed '/^  head #/!d;s///' |
 while IFS=' :x@,' read i w h x y; do
   import -window root -crop ${w}x$h+$x+$y head_$i.png
 done

Screenshot of the active/focused window

The following script takes a screenshot of the currently focused window. It works with EWMH/NetWM compatible X Window Managers. To avoid overwriting previous screenshots, the current date is used as the filename.

 #!/bin/bash
 activeWinLine=$(xprop -root | grep "_NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW(WINDOW)")
 activeWinId=${activeWinLine:40}
 import -window "$activeWinId" /tmp/$(date +%F_%H%M%S_%N).png

Alternatively, the following should work regardless of EWMH support:

 import -window "$(xdotool getwindowfocus -f)" /tmp/$(date +%F_%H%M%S_%N).png

GIMP

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

xwd

xwd is part of the xorg-xwd package.

Take a screenshot of the root window:

xwd -root -out screenshot.xwd

See the xwd man page for more information.

scrot

scrot, which is available in the official repositories, 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 man scrot for more information. You can simply automate the file to uploaded like so https://github.com/kaihendry/Kai-s--HOME/tree/master/bin

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.

KDE

If you use KDE, you might want to use KSnapshot, which can also be activated using <Prt Scr>.

KSnapshot is provided by the kdegraphics-ksnapshot package in [extra].

Xfce

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 <Prt Scr> or Apps->Accessories->Take Screenshot.

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 <Prt 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 <Prt Scr> key in Openbox, you need to add the following to the keyboard section of your rc.xml file:

<!-- 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>

Terminal

Output with ansi codes

You can use the script command, part of the util-linux package.

$ script

Virtual console

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

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:

sudo setterm -dump 1 -file screen.dump

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