Xfce Forum

woodsman

Member

Registered: 2007-08-17

Posts: 3

Screen captures to the clipboard

Greetings,

I don't know whether this forum is an appropriate place to post, but I will see where the thread leads.

A feature missing from Xfce that I would much like to see added is simple screen captures to the clipboard using the Print Screen and Alt-Print Screen keys. The former grabs the entire desktop and the latter only the active window. This feature is standard in KDE and GNOME, and has been standard in Windows at least since Windows 3.1. Xfce provides no such feature.

I am not seeking an extravagant screen capture tool, or even something like KSnapshot, although that too would be a great addition to Xfce. Just a simple screen capture-to-clipboard feature activated by the commonly used Print Screen and Alt-Print Screen keys.

I think the plugin route is the more immediate and efficient route. At a later date the plugin could be absorbed into the main trunk code if desired. If any plugin hackers want to take a go at this, please email me through the forum. I am prepared to help test and write/edit documentation. As this feature is standard in KDE and GNOME, there really is no need to reinvent the wheel. Just grab that code and adapt to Xfce. I'm guessing for any skilled Xfce/GTK hacker that such a project would require only a few of hours or so.

Note: I am not interested in cutesy command line hacks or work-arounds. The wonderful beauty of this standard one-key screen capture to the clipboard is the feature just works and satisfies the needs of most people most of the time.

Thanks everybody for your time.

---

http://humanreadable.nfshost.com/

woodsman

Member

Registered: 2007-08-17

Posts: 3

Re: Screen captures to the clipboard

After posting my original request I later browsed the Zenwalk 4.6.1 distro. By pure happenstance I then discovered the screenshooter plugin! This plugin is not listed at the Xfce plugin web site and hence my previous ignorance about the plugin.

This plugin seems to more or less provide what most users need. However, I have not discovered a way to map the Print Screen or Alt-Print Screen keys. Seems the only way to distinguish between a full screen capture and capturing the active window is to open the Properties dialog box and toggle the check box. A bit clunky but doable.

An improvement request is to provide a way to map the keyboard to those two functions. What is the appropriate channel to make such a request?

Also, the plugin does not release the captured files after saving. Perform an lsof to verify this.

Thanks.

---

http://humanreadable.nfshost.com/

purplehaze

Member

Registered: 2007-08-17

Posts: 3

Re: Screen captures to the clipboard

Salut !

I wrote a little script for my personnal use. It provides two ways of taking a screenshot : the whole screen or a selected window (see code, there is two options --screen and --window)
edit : it doesn't alas capture to the clipboard as you wish ...
I bound this script with the usual shortcuts using the keyboards settings panel.

here is a code snippet :

#!/bin/bash

# needs imagemagick's tools
# some doc : http://www.imagemagick.org/script/import.php

new_name() {
echo ~/screenshot`date +%y%m%d%H%M%S`.png
}

case $1 in
--window)
import -frame -screen -display :0 `new_name`
;;
--screen)
import -window root -display :0 `new_name`
;;
*)
echo "options :
        --screen
        --window"
;;
esac

you may place the script in your $HOME/bin directory with a lovely name of your choice. don't forget to chmod +x it and be sure $HOME/bin is in your path. You may also place the script in /usr/bin/ if you prefer.

My script works well but i think the name generator (new_name) is too complicated. I would rather use a simple incremental naming algorithm.
i.e. :
screenshot 1
screenshot 2
etc..
but i have no idea how to do this without a lot of code. Any idea ?

ciao,
purplehaze