Screen capture

This article lists and describes screenshot and screencast software.

Screenshot software

Dedicated software

Application list

CoreShot — C-Suite screen capture utility for Xorg.

https://cubocore.gitlab.io/ || coreshot^AUR

Escrotum — Screen capture tool using PyGTK, inspired by scrot, and can be used as its replacement.

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

Flameshot — Qt-based software for interactive screenshot taking.

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

GNOME Screenshot — Screenshot tool for the GNOME desktop environment.

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

grim — Grab images from a Wayland compositor.

https://sr.ht/~emersion/grim/ || grim

gscreenshot — GTK frontend for multiple screenshot backends including scrot, ImageMagick, PIL, imlib2, and grim; with delays, selection, and copy-to-clipboard functionality.

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

HotShots — Application for capturing screens and saving them in a variety of image formats as well as adding annotations and graphical data (arrows, lines, texts, ...).

https://github.com/obiwankennedy/HotShots || hotshots-git^AUR

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

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

ksnip — Qt-based cross-platform screenshot tool that provides many annotation features, basic image manipulation and remote destination (ftp, imgur, script).

https://github.com/ksnip/ksnip || ksnip

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.

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

LXImage-Qt — Qt port of LXImage image viewer and screenshot tool (run with lximage-qt --screenshot).

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

maim — Simple command line utility that takes screenshots 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.

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

menyoki — Command line screenshot and screencast tool with support for image manipulation operations.

https://github.com/orhun/menyoki || menyoki

mss — An xrandr-aware screenshots Python module with a minimal CLI.

https://pypi.org/project/mss/ || python-mss

Pantheon Screenshot — Screenshot tool designed for elementary OS.

https://github.com/elementary/screenshot || pantheon-screenshot

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

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

ScreenGrab — Qt application designed to quickly take screenshots (inactive development).

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

scrot — Simple command-line screenshot utility for X.

https://github.com/resurrecting-open-source-projects/scrot || scrot

Shotgun — Minimal X screenshot utility written in Rust (according to the author, it is twice as fast as maim).

https://github.com/neXromancers/shotgun || shotgun

Shutter — Rich screenshot and editing program (supports delay).

https://shutter-project.org/ || shutter

Spectacle — KDE application for screen capture, 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 kde-graphics.

https://apps.kde.org/spectacle/ || spectacle

Xfce4-screenshooter — Application and Xfce panel plugin to take screenshots about the entire screen, the active window or a selected region; part of xfce4-goodies.

https://docs.xfce.org/apps/screenshooter/start || xfce4-screenshooter

xwd — X Window dump utility.

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

Usage

This article or section needs language, wiki syntax or style improvements. See Help:Style for reference.

Reason: In my opinion, it's better to merge small description-only section (escrotum) into appropriate unit of the aforementioned application list, and create wiki pages for others. (Discuss in Talk:Screen capture)

maim

maim is aimed to be an improved scrot.

Save the full screen to file:

$ maim filename

Prompt for selection and save to file:

$ maim --select filename

Save the active window to file, assuming xdotool is installed:

$ maim --window $(xdotool getactivewindow) filename

Prompt for selection, save without cursor, and store it to clipboard, assuming xclip is installed:

$ maim -s | xclip -selection clipboard -t image/png -i

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.

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.

Desktop environment specific

Budgie

Budgie ships with its own screenshot utility called BudgieScreenshot.

It allows capturing the whole screen using PrintScreen, the active window or a selected area. See Keyboard Shortcuts for the shortcut to a specific action.

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 PrintScreen.

GNOME

GNOME users can press PrintScreen or click the camera icon in the system menu. You can also optionally install gnome-screenshot and open it via Apps > Accessories > Take Screenshot.

GNOME features built-in screen recording with the Ctrl+Shift+Alt+r key combination. A red circle is displayed in the bottom right corner of the screen when the recording is in progress. After the recording is finished, a file named Screencast from %d%u-%c.webm is saved in the Videos directory. In order to use the screencast feature the gst-plugin-pipewire and gst-plugins-good packages need to be installed.

KDE

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

Spectacle is provided by the spectacle package.

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.

Other desktop environments or window managers

This article or section is a candidate for merging with ImageMagick#Screenshot taking.

Notes: This subsection is not about "other DE/WM" in general, but about usage of import. (Discuss in Talk:Screen capture)

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

Note that import is part of the imagemagick package. Adding the above command to the PrintScreen 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 PrintScreen 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 PrintScreen above does not work, see Keyboard input 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

FFmpeg

See FFmpeg#Screen capture.

Screencast software

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

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

GPU Screen Recorder — Screen recorder that captures your screen on the GPU only to vastly improve performance, comparable to NVIDIA ShadowPlay and supports live streaming and replay buffer as well.

https://git.dec05eba.com/gpu-screen-recorder-gtk/about/ || gpu-screen-recorder-gtk^AUR

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

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

Kazam — Screencasting program with design in mind that handles multiscreen setups.

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

Kooha — Simple screen recorder with a minimal GTK interface.

https://github.com/SeaDve/Kooha || kooha

menyoki — Screen capture and perform ImageOps on the command line (X11 only, Wayland planned).

https://github.com/orhun/menyoki || menyoki

Open Broadcaster Software — Video recording and live streaming application.

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

obs-gnome-screencast^AUR – plugin for GNOME screencast feature, supports Wayland

Peek — Simple screencast tool that produces GIF, APNG, WebM or MP4 animations (no longer under development as of 2023-01).

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

RecApp — User friendly screencaster written in GTK using free GStreamer modules and not dependent on FFmpeg (no longer under development).

https://github.com/amikha1lov/RecApp || recapp^AUR

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

https://recordmydesktop.sourceforge.net/ || CLI: recordmydesktop, GTK2: gtk-recordmydesktop^AUR

screencast — Command line interface to record an X11 desktop using FFmpeg, having support for offline recording and live streaming.

https://github.com/dbermond/screencast/ || screencast^AUR

Screencast — Simple screencast recorder designed for elementary OS.

https://github.com/artemanufrij/screencast || pantheon-screencast^AUR

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

https://www.maartenbaert.be/simplescreenrecorder/ || simplescreenrecorder^AUR

Spectacle — KDE application for screen capture, capable of capturing video (without sound) of the whole desktop, a single screen or a single window on Wayland; part of kde-graphics (works only with kwin activated, so cannot be used with other window managers).

https://apps.kde.org/spectacle/ || spectacle

VokoScreen — Powerful screencast GUI tool using GStreamer, supporting numerous codec, capture video and sound, from internal or external (micro, webcam) and screen/window/view sources, zoom and highlight of mouse region+buttons but with limited Wayland support.

https://linuxecke.volkoh.de/vokoscreen/vokoscreen.html || vokoscreen

Wayfarer — GTK4 screen recorder for Wayland with Pipewire as well as Xorg.

https://github.com/stronnag/wayfarer || wayfarer^AUR

Wayland

Capturing the screen on Wlroots-based compositor can be done using grim or grimshot (from sway-contrib), for screenshots and wf-recorder (or wf-recorder-git^AUR) for video; wlrobs-hg^AUR is an obs-studio plugin that allows you to screen capture on wlroots-based compositors. Optionally, slurp can be used to select the part of the screen to capture. If your GPU supports vaapi encoding, wl-screenrec-git^AUR can be a more efficient alternative to wf-recorder.

Take a screenshot of the whole screen:

$ grim screenshot.png

Take a screenshot of current window in Sway:

$ swaymsg -t get_tree | jq -r '.. | select(.focused?) | .rect | "\(.x),\(.y) \(.width)x\(.height)"' | grim -g - screenshot.png

Take a screenshot of current window in Hyprland:

$ hyprctl -j activewindow | jq -r '"\(.at[0]),\(.at[1]) \(.size[0])x\(.size[1])"' | grim -g - screenshot.png

Take a screenshot of a part of the screen:

$ slurp | grim -g - screenshot.png

Take a screenshot of a part of the screen and put the output into the clipboard using wl-clipboard:

$ slurp | grim -g - - | wl-copy

Capture a video of the whole screen:

$ wf-recorder -f recording.mp4

Capture a video of a part of the screen:

$ wf-recorder -g "$(slurp)"

Tip:

slurpshot is an interactive screenshot taking script using bemenu.
To use a post-capture screenshot editing and drawing tool such as swappy: grim -g "$(slurp)" - | swappy -f -

Tip:

screenshot.sh GUI Screenshot Tool for Wayland Using zenity, grim and slurp

Additionally, some programs mentioned above work under Wayland (e.g. ksnip, green-recorder^AUR).

Screencasting

Via GNOME screencast

green-recorder^AUR, obs-gnome-screencast^AUR and obs-studio support screen recording on Wayland using GNOME screencast feature.

Via Hyprland

The Hyprland window manager allows screen casting and recording with OBS (including selection of individual windows and workspaces) when used with xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland [1].

Via a virtual webcam video feed

See v4l2loopback#Casting Wayland using wf-recorder.

Tip:

This method has been tested with zoom^AUR (desktop client running under xorg-xwayland) and BigBlueButton under chromium (under firefox the resolution is really low); skypeforlinux-bin^AUR detects the virtual video device VirtualVideoDevice, but outputs a blank screen.
The example uses wf-recorder but you can use whatever software, just feed the output to the virtual device.

Install wf-recorder (or wf-recorder-git^AUR) and v4l2loopback-dkms. Load the v4l2loopback kernel module with the following parameters:

# modprobe v4l2loopback exclusive_caps=1 card_label=VirtualVideoDevice

Verify that a new virtual video device VirtualVideoDevice has been created:

$ v4l2-ctl --list-devices

...
VirtualVideoDevice (platform:v4l2loopback-000):
	/dev/video2
...

Start recording the screen with wf-recorder and feed the output to the new virtual video device VirtualVideoDevice created by v4l2loopback:

$ wf-recorder --muxer=v4l2 --codec=rawvideo --file=/dev/video2 -x yuv420p

The yuv420p colour space is required for the video output to be compatible with Zoom [2].

Tip: If you encounter Unknown V4L2 pixel format equivalent for rgb0 run wf-recorder with --force-yuv or -t to force conversion of the data to yuv format, before sending it to the GPU. [3]

You can now select the above virtual video device as your "webcam" in video calling/video conferencing applications (the device is called VirtualVideoDevice). You can use ffplay (part of ffmpeg), mpv, or gst-launch (part of gstreamer) to verify that the virtual video device indeed outputs your screenshare:

$ ffplay /dev/video2

$ mpv av://v4l2:/dev/video2

$ gst-launch-1.0 -v v4l2src device=/dev/video2 ! glimagesink

If Firefox is unable to read the video stream and prints a message like "AbortError: Starting video failed", try preloading v4l2compat.so:

$ LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/v4l1compat.so firefox

Sharing individual applications

Warning: This method does not involve a proper implementation of individual application sharing as the region being shared will not change after resizing any windows.

As explained above, wf-recorder is able to record only a portion of the screen by first selecting a region with slurp. To use this functionality for sharing a specific region/application window through a virtual video device, start recording the screen with the following modified command:

$ wf-recorder -g "$(slurp)" --muxer=v4l2 --codec=rawvideo --file=/dev/video2 -x yuv420p

After selecting a region of the screen, you will be able to access the video feed through the virtual video device /dev/video2 as above.

Via the WebRTC protocol

Note: This method only allows sharing an entire output and not individual applications [4].

See PipeWire#WebRTC screen sharing.

Chromium and Firefox should now be able to access the screenshare. You can verify this through Mozilla's getUserMedia / getDisplayMedia Test Page.

Screencast Wayland windows with X11 applications

You can share native Wayland windows (or the whole screen/workspace) to the X11 application. For this you need to use xwaylandvideobridge. See Fixing Wayland: Xwayland screen casting for details.

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 (not to be confused with ansi2html from python-ansi2html).

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^AUR to take a screenshot.

Virtual console

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:

# setterm -dump 1 -file screen.dump

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

Screencast of console

asciinema allows to record a whole terminal session activity, which is saved in a file in its own (open) format. This file can be played with the same tool or an HTML5 version of the tool, and can be shared on the asciinema.org official web site of the application, or on any own hosted HTML version.

Usage: asciinema(1) or asciinema --help.

asciinema rec output.cast records the session, Ctrl+\ can pause/resume it, Ctrl-d/exit of the session will stop it. Name of output file is optional.

Interesting arguments for recording:

-c command if you just want to record a specific command action/output
-i 1.2 record for 1.2 seconds only
-t "beautiful title" add a title to the terminalcast

Other functions than recording:

asciinema play file.cast play an asciinmea record file
asciinema upload file.cast upload the file on asciinema.org for sharing
asciinema auth manage recordings on asciinema.org account

Troubleshooting

Screenshot uses old screen state

See KDE#Spectacle screenshot uses old screen state.

NVIDIA clipping background

If the nvidia proprietary driver is in use and the screen recording is experiencing background clipping, enable the ForceCompositionPipeline setting. See NVIDIA/Troubleshooting#Avoid screen tearing for details.