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I am a big fan of Mate desktop. Simple and very functional.

But there one thing I'd address to the mate desktop: its screenshot utility is too poor.

The very single feature I miss there is being able to take a screenshot of only a part of the screen. It is apparently available with gnome-screenshot as from this post: What screenshot tools are available?

Is there any way I could replace mate-screenshot to gnome-screenshot?

I tried sudo apt-get install gnome-screenshot but then if I try to launch it, I have

▶ gnome-screenshot
** Message: Unable to use GNOME Shell's builtin screenshot interface, resorting to fallback X11.

Besides, I really need the shortcuts (the whole point is to achieve it in two clicks), so even if I get it working, I'll also need this.

FYI, I was using shutter earlier, but removed it because it was lacking the desktop shortcuts and sometimes very buggy (need to hard shutdown the system).

Community
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Augustin Riedinger
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3 Answers3

8

I resolved the same issue by adding the --interactive option

gnome-screenshot --interactive
N0rbert
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tmcp
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    or mate-screenshot --interactive – Searene Feb 21 '18 at 13:21
  • Also fixes the same bug on Unity desktop after upgrading to Ubuntu 22.04! Unfortunately, we cannot change the default screenshot commands, but we can still add custom shortcuts with --interactive. – hsandt Mar 07 '23 at 20:26
  • Actually, one issue with this option is that is shows the config popup before taking the screenshot, even if you pass --window or --area, making the process much slower (you must press enter once to confirm the first popup). --clipboard also seems ignored, you need to manually click on the 2nd popup to copy to clipboard. – hsandt Mar 07 '23 at 20:35
4

Actually, mate-screenshot does have the utility you want, (see man mate-screenshot) so there's no need to install an extra package. In a terminal, you can use the -a flag

mate-screenshot -a

This turns the pointer into a cross-hair and you can click and drag to select the area you want to grab.

You can set a custom shortcut for it (for example shift+prt sc like gnome-screenshot) in:

System > Preferences > Hardware > Keyboard Shortcuts

click the + Add button to add a custom one.

You may well find that using the command mate-screenshot -a in the keyboard shortcut does not work, in which case you need to modify the command to call bash and set DISPLAY... First check the variable in a terminal:

echo $DISPLAY

and take note of the output. For me it's :0.0

Then use this command in the shortcut setting:

bash -c "DISPLAY=:0.0 mate-screenshot -a"

Replacing :0.0 to match the output from echo $DISPLAY

Zanna
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1

As @Zanna sais, mate-screenshot does have the availability of doing area screenshots.

But there is a well known bug (https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-utils/issues/37) which makes the command with this option fail.

As mentioned in the comments, the solution is to slighly delay the command:

#!/bin/bash
sleep 1
exec /usr/bin/mate-screenshot $@

within eg. /usr/local/bin/mate-screenshot and use it instead.

It changed my life, I keep using this feature now!

Augustin Riedinger
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  • Looks too difficult. For which Ubuntu MATE version do you propose this solution? Why do not you want to use mate-screenshot -i instead? – N0rbert Dec 05 '19 at 18:35
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    Oh no ! You have no idea how mate-screenshot -a is much UX friendly than -i. Press PrintScreen make a square, and that's it, you have the cropped screenshot you need. What seems so difficult with this? I'm using the latest version of Linux Mint but the bug is hard to solve hence is here to stay. – Augustin Riedinger Dec 05 '19 at 18:53