Jorisvandijk.com

Living on Linux

Screenshot part of your display using scrot

So I have been using scrot to take screenshots for ages. The only downside has been the inability to grab just a portion of the screen. There are newer applications that do this out of the box. Applications like Flameshot. The downside of that application is that it pulls the entire Qt5-base and several other Qt applications down with it. I do not use any Qt applications, so having to pull down all of those just to take a partial screenshot is insane to me.

So I have been taking full screen screenshots and cropping them in Gimp for ages now. Recently though I came across a Reddit post with an amazingly simple solution to my problem. It uses xclip's selection flag with scrot to get this functionality, which I find brilliant. I have adapted this into a bash script, which can be used with any window manager.

#!/usr/bin/env bash

#	ScreenShot 2.0
#	Take a screenshot, save to directory and copy to clipboard.
#	Dependencies: scrot, xclip
#
#	By Joris van Dijk | Jorisvandijk.com
#	Licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0	

if [[ $1 == "s" ]]; then
	scrot ~/Pictures/ss/%d-%m-%Y-%T.png -e 'xclip -selection c -t image/png < $f'
elif [[ $1 == "p" ]]; then
	scrot ~/Pictures/ss/%d-%m-%Y-%T.png -s -e 'xclip -selection c -t image/png < $f'
else
	echo "Wrong flag!"
fi

Save the script, make it executable and use it like so:

# This takes a fullscreen screenshot
./ScreenShot s

# This takes a partial
./ScreenShot p

Obviously it's best to use this script in a key binding. To see how I use it, check out my dotfiles. This script can be found in the bin directory.