Ubuntu comes with a nifty little screenshot application. You just hit the “print” key (your keyboard has one, it probably says “Prt Scr” over “SysRq”) and voila, a nifty little application window comes up and asks you where you’d like to save the screenshot and what you’d like to call it.
Nifty is one thing, fast and efficient is quite another.
There’s another Linux screenshot utility that I’m fond of. It’s called Scrot.
Why did they name it Scrot? I’m sure it has to do with “screenshots” somehow, but come on!
What’s even worse is that to get the instructions for how to set it up the way you want… you type the following command into a “terminal” window:
man scrot
Anyway… the application itself is basically just some code to make a screenshot appear of a specified filename, size, quality and location just by the press of a key. Here’s how I set it up.
In a terminal:
sudo aptitude install scrot
then
gconf-editor
once the editor application opens, go to apps/metacity/keybinding_commands, then select “command_screenshot” and change the value to:
scrot '%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M-%S_$wx$.png' -e 'mv $f ~/Screenshots/'
Easy as pie! Also, this process explains what drives many people away from Linux.
The end result of all this is that now I just get a screenshot instead of two questions I need to think about answers for. And this won’t work for me on my LXDE setup…. at least not until how I figure out how to assign a keyboard shortcut in LXDE. That requires more editing of certain text files, and I really don’t know what I’m doing when it comes to that.
But Scrot?
Sigh.
heh… heh… I said but Scrot.
