What is your favorite Linux screen capture tool?

With many options to choose from, you've got plenty of choices when it comes to capturing what's on your screen.
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The ability to take screenshots in Linux is something that I find really useful when composing how-tos and training materials for students or readers. But there are many different ways to do this.

My own personal favorite is Gnome Screenshot. Typically I use Linux on a desktop or laptop and the training materials even those on those that feature the command line can be easily captured by Gnome Screenshot. I like it because it provides some options that make later use of those screen grabs easy to use. The need for additional editing of the screen grabs is precluded when you can easily tailor each screen grab to exactly what you are trying to capture. Your options include grabbing the whole screen, grabbing just the current window, or selecting an area to grab. Screenshot also provides an option to time the delay of the screen grab.

But my favorite isn't necessarily the same as yours, and you may not even use Gnome at all. What is your favorite Linux screen capture tool, and why do you like it? Let us know in the poll above and the comments below. And to learn more about some of the many options for Linux screenshot tools, check out the links below.

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Educator, entrepreneur, open source advocate, life long learner, Python teacher. M.A. in Educational Psychology, M.S. Ed. in Educational Leadership, Linux system administrator.

20 Comments

Not on the list, but I've been looking at `peek` (appears to be a solid contender):

https://github.com/phw/peek

I use xfce4-screenshooter - it is built into xfce. When I had kde, I used ksnapshot.

KDE's Spectacle: it works out of the box on Plasma, it can take the whole desktop, the current screen, a window, a particular region, share the image on a number of services or just send the capture to any program to process it.

xwd | convert xwd:- somename.someformat

recent versions of Imagemagick's convert won't auto-recognize the xwd format from a pipe, hence the xwd:- helper.
The beauty is that you can screenshot remote displays, can do the entire screen, windows, or regions, have the entire image-editing power of Imagemagick available, and can end up with any supported image format.

I just use OBS Studio. Very simple to add your desktop as the video source.

greenshot

Spectacle kde neon

Another vote for KDE Spectacle.

It has all the most useful features of Shutter without all of it's clutter.

Since I use MATE primarily, MATE Screenshot is what I use. If a DE provides a screenshot utility, I usually use that. If it's any other window manager, scrot FTW.

maim. Spectacle is great on KDE, but there isn't an easy way to map a key to take a region screenshot and copy it to clipboard automatically. With maim and xclip, you can map a single key to grab a region and copy to clipboard easily in KDE with a custom shortcut:

maim -s | xclip -selection clipboard -t image/png

That's funny, I have that very same camera...

I've been using Shutter, although I'm definitely open to lighter-weight alternatives. Shutter is more like something I would have used when I was at a multimedia software company and we'd need screenshots for documentation.

As far as I know.....since I've almost always used GNome?...it would have to be the Gnome screenshot tool. I've dabbled in other desktops and distros, but I continue to come back to Fedora Linux....so its with their apps I'm most familiar.

Does any come prepackaged in Ubuntu ?

KDE Spectacle

KSnapshot

+1 for KSnapshot (For those of us running KDE 4 still)

In reply to by Sylvain (not verified)

I use xgrab

I use import from Imagemagick .

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