10

I am a big fan of Mate desktop. Simple and very functional.

But there one thing I'd address to the mate desktop: its screenshot utility is too poor.

The very single feature I miss there is being able to take a screenshot of only a part of the screen. It is apparently available with gnome-screenshot as from this post: What screenshot tools are available?

Is there any way I could replace mate-screenshot to gnome-screenshot?

I tried sudo apt-get install gnome-screenshot but then if I try to launch it, I have

▶ gnome-screenshot
** Message: Unable to use GNOME Shell's builtin screenshot interface, resorting to fallback X11.

Besides, I really need the shortcuts (the whole point is to achieve it in two clicks), so even if I get it working, I'll also need this.

FYI, I was using shutter earlier, but removed it because it was lacking the desktop shortcuts and sometimes very buggy (need to hard shutdown the system).

Community
  • 1
Augustin Riedinger
  • 478

3 Answers3

8

I resolved the same issue by adding the --interactive option

gnome-screenshot --interactive
N0rbert
  • 103,263
tmcp
  • 349
5

Actually, mate-screenshot does have the utility you want, (see man mate-screenshot) so there's no need to install an extra package. In a terminal, you can use the -a flag

mate-screenshot -a

This turns the pointer into a cross-hair and you can click and drag to select the area you want to grab.

You can set a custom shortcut for it (for example shift+prt sc like gnome-screenshot) in:

System > Preferences > Hardware > Keyboard Shortcuts

click the + Add button to add a custom one.

You may well find that using the command mate-screenshot -a in the keyboard shortcut does not work, in which case you need to modify the command to call bash and set DISPLAY... First check the variable in a terminal:

echo $DISPLAY

and take note of the output. For me it's :0.0

Then use this command in the shortcut setting:

bash -c "DISPLAY=:0.0 mate-screenshot -a"

Replacing :0.0 to match the output from echo $DISPLAY

Zanna
  • 72,312
1

As @Zanna sais, mate-screenshot does have the availability of doing area screenshots.

But there is a well known bug (https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-utils/issues/37) which makes the command with this option fail.

As mentioned in the comments, the solution is to slighly delay the command:

#!/bin/bash
sleep 1
exec /usr/bin/mate-screenshot $@

within eg. /usr/local/bin/mate-screenshot and use it instead.

It changed my life, I keep using this feature now!

Augustin Riedinger
  • 478