ScreenShot

So I have been using scrot to take screenshots for ages. The only downside has been the inability to grab just a portion of the screen. There are newer applications that do this out of the box. Applications like Flameshot. The downside of that application is that it pulls the entire Qt5-base and several other Qt applications down with it. I do not use any Qt applications, so having to pull down all of those just to take a partial screenshot is insane to me.

So I have been taking full screen screenshots and cropping them in Gimp for ages now. Recently though I came across a Reddit post with an amazingly simple solution to my problem. It uses xclip's selection flag with scrot to get this functionality, which I find brilliant. I have adapted this into a bash script, which can be used with any window manager.

#!/usr/bin/env bash

#	ScreenShot 2.0
#	Take a screenshot, save to directory and copy to clipboard.
#	Dependencies: scrot, xclip
#
#	By Joris van Dijk | Jorisvandijk.com 
#	Licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0	

if [[ $1 == "s" ]]; then
	scrot ~/Pictures/%d-%m-%Y-%T.png -e 'xclip -selection c -t image/png < $f'
elif [[ $1 == "p" ]]; then
	scrot ~/Pictures/%d-%m-%Y-%T.png -s -e 'xclip -selection c -t image/png < $f'
else
	echo "Wrong flag!"
fi

warning

This script will save the screenshot to your ~/Pictures directory. If you do not have this directory, you will have to create it before running the script!

Save the script as ScreenShot, make it executable and use it like so:

Take a fullscreen screenshot:

./ScreenShot s

Take a partial screenshot:

./ScreenShot p

tip

Obviously it's best to use this script in a key binding. To see how I use it, check out my dotfiles.