Screen capture
This article lists and describes screenshot and screencast software.
Contents
Screenshot software
Dedicated software
- Deepin Screenshot — Quite easy-to-use screenshot tool. Features: global hotkey to trigger screenshot tool, take screenshot of a selected area, easy to add text and line drawings onto the screenshot. Python/Qt5 based.
- Escrotum — Screen capture using pygtk, inspired by scrot.
- Flameshot — Qt5 based software for interactive screenshot taking. Select the desired area, draw with different tools and enjoy the customization capabilities.
- GNOME Screenshot — Screenshot tool for the GNOME desktop.
- grim — Grab images from a Wayland compositor.
- gscreenshot — Simple GTK screenshot utility with delays, selection, and copy-to-clipboard functionality.
- imgur-screenshot — Take screenshot selection, upload to imgur. + more cool things
- 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.
-
LXQt Screenshot — Screenshot tool for LXQt. Run with
lximage-qt --screenshot
.
- maim — Simple command line utility that takes screenshots. It is meant to replace scrot and performs better than scrot in many ways.
- MATE Screenshot — Screenshot tool for the MATE desktop.
- ScreenCloud — Take a screenshot of the entire screen or to select an area and then uploading the screenshot to imgur+auth. has plugins and system tray.
- ScreenGrab — Cross-platform application designed to quickly take screenshots (Qt).
- Scrot — Simple command-line screenshot utility for X.
- Shotgun — Minimal X screenshot utility written in Rust. According to the author it is twice as fast as maim.
- Shutter — Rich screenshot and editing program. Supports delay.
- Spectacle — KDE application for taking screenshots. It is 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 kdegraphics.
- Xfce4 Screenshooter — Application and Xfce4 panel plugin to take screenshots about the entire screen, the active window or a selected region. Part of xfce4-goodies.
- xwd — X Window System image dumping utility
xwd
Take a screenshot of the root window:
$ xwd -root -out screenshot.xwd
import
can also be used with xwd
.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. You can simply automate the file to uploaded like so [1].
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
.escrotum
escrotum-gitAUR screen capture using PyGTK, inspired by scrot
Created because scrot has glitches when selection mode is used with refreshing windows.
Because the command line interface its almost the same as scrot, can be used as a replacement of it.
maim
maim is aimed to be an improved scrot.
Takes screenshots of your desktop using slop for regions. It is meant to overcome shortcomings of scrot.
Desktop environment specific
Spectacle
If you use KDE, you might want to use Spectacle
.
Spectacle is provided by the spectacle package.
Xfce Screenshooter
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 PrintScreen
or Apps > Accessories > Take Screenshot. You may need to install gnome-screenshot.
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
.
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/$(date '+%Y%m%d-%H%M%S').png
Note that import
is part of the imagemagick package. Adding the above command to the PrintScreen
key to Compiz allows to take the screenshot to the Pictures folder according to date and time.
Notice that the rc.xml
file in Openbox does not understand commas; so, in order to bind that command to the PrintScreen
key in Openbox, you need to add the following to the keyboard section of your rc.xml
file:
rc.xml
<!-- Screenshot --> <keybind key="Print"> <action name="Execute"> <command>sh -c "import -window root ~/Pictures/$(date '+%Y%m%d-%H%M%S').png"</command> </action> </keybind>
If the Print
above does not work, see Extra keyboard keys 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
Note that scrot actually uses imlib2
.
FFmpeg
Screencast software
See also FFmpeg#Screen capture and Wikipedia:Comparison of screencasting software.
Screencast utilities allow you to create a video of your desktop or individual windows.
- Byzanz — Simple screencast tool that produces GIF animations.
- Deepin Screen Recorder — Screen recorder application for Deepin desktop.
- FFcast — FFmpeg-based screencast tool written in Bash.
- Green Recorder — Simple yet functional desktop recorder for Linux systems.
- Kazam — Screencasting program with design in mind. Handles multiscreen setups.
- OBS — Video recording and live streaming application.
-
https://obsproject.com/ || obs-studio
- obs-gnome-screencastAUR – plugin for GNOME screencast feature, supports Wayland.
- obs-xdg-portal-gitAUR – plugin that uses Desktop portal for Wayland & X11 screencasting
- Peek — Simple screencast tool that produces GIF, APNG, WebM or MP4 animations.
- RecordItNow — Plugin based desktop recorder for KDE.
- RecordMyDesktop — Easy to use utility that records your desktop into the ogg format with a CLI, GTK or Qt interface. (inactive development)
- http://recordmydesktop.sourceforge.net/ || CLI: recordmydesktop, GTK: gtk-recordmydesktopAUR, Qt: qt-recordmydesktopAUR
- SimpleScreenRecorder — Feature-rich screen recorder written in C++/Qt5 that supports X11 and OpenGL.
- VokoScreen — Simple screencast GUI tool using FFmpeg.
- XVidCap — Application used for recording a screencast or digital recording of an X Window System screen output with an audio narration.
Wayland
Capturing the screen can be done using grim or swayshotAUR for screenshots and wf-recorderAUR (or wf-recorder-gitAUR) for video; wlrobs-hgAUR 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.
Take a screenshot of the whole screen:
$ grim screenshot.png
Take a screenshot of current window:
$ grim -g "$(swaymsg -t get_tree | jq -r '.. | select(.focused?) | .rect | "\(.x),\(.y) \(.width)x\(.height)"')" screenshot.png
Take a screenshot of a part of the screen:
$ grim -g "$(slurp)" screenshot.png
Capture a video of the whole screen:
$ wf-recorder -o recording.mp4
Capture a video of a part of the screen:
$ wf-recorder -g "$(slurp)"
Example of usage with grim, slurp and wl-clipboard, screenshot directly with Print button to clipboard when running Sway:
~/.config/sway/config
bindsym --release Print exec grim -g \"$(slurp)" - | wl-copy
Screensharing
Via GNOME screencast
green-recorderAUR, obs-gnome-screencastAUR and obs-xdg-portal-gitAUR support screen recording on Wayland using GNOME screencast feature.
Via a virtual webcam video feed
WfRecorder
, but outputs a blank screen.Install wf-recorderAUR (or wf-recorder-gitAUR) and v4l2loopback-dkmsAUR. Load the v4l2loopback
kernel module with the following parameters:
# modprobe v4l2loopback exclusive_caps=1 card_label=WfRecorder
Verify that a new virtual video device WfRecorder
has been created:
$ v4l2-ctl --list-devices
... WfRecorder (platform:v4l2loopback-000): /dev/video2 ...
Start recording the screen with wf-recorder
and feed the output to the new virtual video device WfRecorder
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].
You can now select the above virtual video device as your "webcam" in video calling/video conferencing applications (the device is called WfRecorder
). 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
Sharing individual applications
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 vitual video device /dev/video2
as above.
Via the WebRTC protocol
Install xdg-desktop-portal-wlrAUR and libpipewire02 [4].
Set the following environment variables before starting your Wayland session:
export XDG_SESSION_TYPE=wayland export XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=sway
XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP
needs to be set to sway
for xdg-desktop-portal-wlrAUR to run [5].Enter the URL chrome://flags/#enable-webrtc-pipewire-capturer
into a Chromium tab and enable WebRTC PipeWire support
.
Chromium (and Firefox if installed from fedora-firefox-wayland-binAUR) should now be able to access the screenshare. You can verify this through Mozilla's getUserMedia / getDisplayMedia Test Page.
Multiple monitors
It is not possible to select the output you want to share "on the fly" [6]. However, it is possible to choose such output globally by passing a flag to xdg-desktop-portal-wlr
[7]. For example, to share output eDP-1
modify xdg-desktop-portal-wlr.service
as follows:
/usr/lib/systemd/user/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr.service
[Unit] Description=Portal service (wlroots implementation) [Service] Type=dbus BusName=org.freedesktop.impl.portal.desktop.wlr ExecStart=@libexecdir@/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr --output=eDP-1 Restart=on-failure
Make sure to kill previous instances of xdg-desktop-portal
for the above change to enter into effect.
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 ansi2htmlAUR package, from the AUR.
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 to take a screenshot.
Virtual console
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.