Can you recommend me a tool compatible with GNOME and Wayland, that allows taking screenshots with on-the-fly editing features like drawing or blurring?

Flameshot worked well on X11, but unfortunately, it lacks Wayland support. ShareX was a great tool on Windows; now I’m looking for something similar for Wayland.

  • Daniel QuinnEnglish
    21•9 months ago

    GNOME has one built in. Just hit the “print screen” button and it should appear.

    • My Password Is 1234OPEnglish
      6•9 months ago

      with on-the-fly editing features like drawing or blurring

      • Daniel QuinnEnglish
        4•9 months ago

        Oops, sorry I didn’t notice that part. I’ve never seen anything like that to be honest. It kinda violates the whole “do only one thing and do it well” UNIX ethos. As a decent work-around, you can just open the resulting images in Gimp?

        • @TheGrandNagus
          3•9 months ago

          In fairness, the “do one thing and do it well” kinda goes out the window with a lot of GUI programs.

          E.g. it’s fair to expect a PDF viewer to also have the ability to digitally sign it. It’s fair for an email client to have an integrated calendar, etc.

        • My Password Is 1234OPEnglish
          3•9 months ago

          That’s what I’ve been doing since flameshot stopped working for me. I ask about the built-in solution, because pasting the image into GIMP and blurring specific parts drastically increases the time to prepare such a screenshot

          • Daniel QuinnEnglish
            1•9 months ago

            I had a good think about how to do this The Unix Way™ and my best sugestion would be to have a script that monitors a folder for screenshots and launches a program (gimp) when it sees something. I wrote one, tried it out, and it works really well!

            For this, I used inotifywait which you can get by installing inotify-tools (at least, that’s what it’s called in Arch):

            #!/bin/bash

inotifywait -m "${HOME}/Pictures/Screenshots/" -e create -e moved_to |
    while read -r directory action file; do
        if [[ "${file}" =~ ^Screenshot.* ]]; then
            gimp "${file}"
        fi
    done

            All this does is use inotify to trigger an action whenever a file is created in the folder (in this case, the Screenshots folder in ${HOME}/Pictures). For our purposes, it just looks for files named Screenshot and if one appears, we launch gimp.

            The result is that if you run this thing and start screenshotting with GNOME’s built-in tool, each action will trigger gimp. You can then further expand this to perform some sort of custom action (either with a gimp macro or with some Python script, whatever) so that whenever you’re running this script, it’ll take that screenshot and do something to it whenever it’s created.

            Does this help?

          • zeluko
            0•9 months ago

            Couldnt you just put a custom script onto the print button to take the screenshot and send it to a light editing program?
            I have my normal screenshot button and another one which afterwards send the selected region to img2txt and puts the detected text into the clipboard.

    • Daniel F.English
      1•9 months ago

      with on-the-fly editing features like drawing or blurring?

      Unfortunately the built-in screenshot tool doesn’t have any editing capabilities.

    • @[email protected]
      4•9 months ago

      I noticed that the Flatpak didn’t work on Fedora 39, probably due to how they build the flatpak or something. I had no problem taking screenshots under Fedora 39 Wayland session using the Appimage.

      • My Password Is 1234OPEnglish
        0•9 months ago

        Same. I want to use flatpak instead of the “raw” binary

        • Strit
          2•9 months ago

          As flameshot is qt based, did you have the xdg QT portal installed when trying? I think that’s what makes the qt stuff talk to other things in a wayland environment.

          • My Password Is 1234OPEnglish
            0•9 months ago

            did you have the xdg QT portal installed when trying?

            Yes

  • 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬
    5•9 months ago

    Don’t know for Gnome, but on Wayland I use grim for screenshots. In combination with slurp I can take screenshots of parts of the screen. The names couldn’t be any more stupid, but the tools work very well.

  • @[email protected]English
    1•9 months ago

    Taking screenshots? What’s the use case for that? That’s an invalid use case. Didn’t you know wayland is only a protocol?

    • @bus_factor
      8•9 months ago

      I’m amazed people don’t get the reference to Gnome devs here. I’m not even a Gnome user and I got the joke right away.

      • @[email protected]
        4•9 months ago

        I guess most people got the reference, but it is just a very tired “joke” that just isn’t funny… and I can’t remember if it was even funny in 2000 when the joke was starting to get popular, but I guess not.

      • k_rol
        1•9 months ago

        I don’t get it either. I’d like to be educated on the topic. What do I look for?

          • @TheGrandNagus
            4•9 months ago

            TL;DR: the changes made to Gnome well over a decade ago aren’t my cup of tea so that means the devs are evil pieces of shit who hate their users.

            Gnome 3 was announced in, what, 2008? And released a little while after. I think people need to let go. The workflow being very different to Windows/MacOS is not a personal attack.

  • TurboWafflz
    1•9 months ago

    I would imagine KDE’s spectacle would work on gnome if you don’t mind it being Qt and not quite fitting in

    • My Password Is 1234OPEnglish
      6•9 months ago

      Okay, so the vending machine works, but the buttons do nothing. Brilliant!

      • @[email protected]English
        3•9 months ago

        Kids today. Back in my day we would just sketch what’s on the screen with a pencil and scan it. Now people can’t even use a graphical tool without an UI…