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There are two super nice features on my iPhone:

  • ability to take a screenshot with a hardware button combo;
  • ability to highlight it with a semitransparent brush;

It enables me to take screenshots and draw "attention areas" over them.

There is a nearly same feature in Windows with Snipping Tool (much less convenient though).

Is there a way in Ubuntu to:

  • run some tool via keyboard shortcut;
  • take a screenshot of some area on the screen;
  • highlight important area with a semitransparent brush.
Denis Kulagin
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  • I am not sure of "highlight important area with a semitransparent brush." but there is an app called 'spectacle' that can fulfill the other two. – Freax Aug 05 '20 at 09:16

1 Answers1

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Can I run some tool via keyboard shortcut?

Yes! Gnome has it's default shortcuts to do so, but so does KDE!

You can also customize Gnome or KDE to run a command when you hit the defined shortcut (see next response for said commands).

Can I take a screenshot of some area on the screen?

If you're using Gnome (the default desktop environment of Ubuntu), you can either press Shift + Prt Scrn or pass the -a option to gnome-screenshot to start it in "area selection mode".

There are other options that you can use, like -w to capture a window, or -c to put the screenshot in the clipboard.

More infos can be found in gnome-screenshot's manpage.

If you're not using Gnome, I can either recommend:

There is a ton of other tools listed in this question, but be warned that some of them (like Shutter) are completely outdated and unmaintained.

Personally, I use maim+xclip. Here the commands I use:

# Screenshot an area and store in clipboard
/bin/sh -c "maim -q -s | xclip -selection clipboard -t image/png"

Screenshot an area and store in file


/bin/sh -c "maim -q -s ~/Pictures/Screenshots/region_$(date +%s).png"

Can I highlight important area with a semitransparent brush?

In that case, flameshot is definitely what you're looking for :)

just do sudo apt-get install flameshot and change your shortcuts to use it as the default!

Taz8du29
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  • You can also use Shutter. It has switches like -s and -m in the terminal. You can bind those commands to keys like the rest. Just man shutter should be adequate for those who want to try it. Shutter is in the standard repos. You will need to play with it to get the edit function working, but it does work. Once you get that working, you can adjust opacity when highlighting areas, with arrows, with text, etc. – KGIII Aug 05 '20 at 15:07
  • @KGIII Shutter is not maintained (since 2014 afaik), requires old libraries (GTK2, Gnome2) and as of Ubuntu 20.04, is not available in the repositories anymore (https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?suite=all&searchon=names&keywords=shutter). – Taz8du29 Aug 05 '20 at 15:39
  • Nah, it was updated as recently as a couple of years ago. It's nearly bug-free and feature complete, so there's not much for them to do with it. It's also still in the 18.04 repositories, though OP doesn't specify which version of Ubuntu they're using. – KGIII Aug 05 '20 at 15:54