[HN Gopher] Flameshot - Simple, powerful screenshot tool for all...
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Flameshot - Simple, powerful screenshot tool for all major
operating systems
Author : VitalyAnkh
Score : 278 points
Date : 2021-03-13 12:15 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (flameshot.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (flameshot.org)
| thibran wrote:
| This was the last essential tool needed to fully switch to
| Wayland.
| amelius wrote:
| Will video be supported at some point?
| solarkraft wrote:
| > Ability to run flameshot on Sway
|
| I assume that this full wlroots-based compositor support (so
| Wayfire as well), which is great!
| chris_wot wrote:
| What is the best screen recorder?
| scaladev wrote:
| OBS Studio + some mechanism to connect it to your compositor.
|
| For wlroots-based compositors like sway here's the most
| lightweight solution: https://hg.sr.ht/~scoopta/wlrobs
|
| For mutter (GNOME): https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-
| portal + pipewire
| solarkraft wrote:
| wlrobs has issues for me with 2 screens of different
| densities. With xdg-desktop-portal-wlr the Pipewire route
| will work as well.
|
| My favorite way to record on wlroots compositors is wf-
| recorder, which seems to be lighter on resources than the
| others.
|
| There's also a fork of SimpleScreenRecorder (with similar
| issues, unfortunately).
|
| Here's an overview of screencasting tools for wlroots based
| compositors like Sway and Wayfire:
| https://github.com/solarkraft/awesome-wlroots#screencasting
| sgt wrote:
| Cool tool but redundant on macOS. Do screenshot using Shift-CMD-4
| or 5 and edit using Preview to add arrows, text etc. I usually
| screenshot a part of the screen directly to the clipboard, then
| paste it into Mail.app where I can quickly edit it and add some
| text, errors, drawings etc.
| sgt wrote:
| Forgot to mention that Ctrl-Shift-CMD-4 etc puts it directly
| into the clipboard. Without Ctrl, it will be saved as a file.
| yc-kraln wrote:
| Redundant on Win10 now, too: WIN+SHIFT+S does the same.
| roenxi wrote:
| When it says "supports Wayland" does it actually mean that
| Wayland upped the game to support screenshots at the protocol
| level, or is this all the major compositors have settled on a de-
| facto screenshot standard to implement in parallel to Wayland?
|
| Because I don't think, technically, it is possible for a
| screenshot tool to "support Wayland".
| scythe wrote:
| According to the website, it has "experimental" support for
| GNOME and Plasma (KDE) on Wayland, with Sway added as of the
| latest version (0.9). As far as I'm aware those three account
| for most Wayland desktops in the wild, but maybe I'm missing
| something.
| [deleted]
| solarkraft wrote:
| There's no _real_ standard, but something that may develop into
| a de-facto standard. The 3 possible ways I am aware of are:
|
| - org.gnome.Shell.Screenshot, a dbus API primarily/only used by
| GNOME
|
| - wlr-screencopy, a Wayland protocol extension primarily
| implemented by wlroots, which Sway, Wayfire and many other
| compositors use
|
| - xdg-desktop-portal, which is promoted by the freedesktop
| group and an abstraction of both APIs using special portals for
| each desktop, Flatpak compatible and delivering screen content
| via Pipewire (supported by Firefox and Chromium)
|
| Flameshot now supports the former 2, I have the most long term
| hope for the latter one.
| roenxi wrote:
| I was researching the issue and noticed wlr-screencapture. I
| was hoping to see it at https://github.com/wayland-
| project/wayland-protocols too, but no luck. Thanks for the
| lead on xfg-desktop-portal.
|
| It is fascinating watching the near decade-long journey as
| Wayland tackles screenshots.
| IshKebab wrote:
| By fascinating you mean depressing, right? If Wayland has
| taken this long to get a basic feature like screenshots
| what other features does it not support?
| samstave wrote:
| Whats fascinating to me is that I had NO idea there was
| some battle of some sorts in the "screenshot biosphere"
|
| TBH I use GreenShot exclusively as it is seamless and does
| every thing I Need [0]
|
| [0] https://i.imgur.com/x0oMzb6.png
|
| And I can do things like this
|
| [1] https://i.imgur.com/ZtR60qw.png
|
| Nested fucking screenshots.
|
| All I have to do is hit prtscrn each iteration I want to
| capture
| flixic wrote:
| If you're looking for a screenshot tool for macOS, I cannot
| recommend CleanShot X highly enough. It in the league of its own,
| with scroll capture, gifs, even changing your desktop in the
| screenshot, but not "in reality". I'm really impressed.
| gingerlime wrote:
| Yes. A thousand times.
|
| At our small company we trialed Jumpshare, CloudApp and a bunch
| of other stuff for both video and screenshots.
|
| Cleanshot was by far the best, and costs the least. Unlike most
| tools which are SaaSified and require a monthly subscription,
| CleanShot still offers a one-off license. It's a steal.
|
| The only one at our company not using Cleanshot is a developer
| on Linux. I think he's using Flameshot.
| lyonlim wrote:
| Indeed. It's indispensable really. Annotations are perfect too!
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| I couldn't see in their home page, but is the cloud upload
| limited to their own cloud? It ticks most of my other boxes,
| but couldn't tell on that one.
| flixic wrote:
| Yeah, their own cloud only. Sample URL: https://cln.sh/WjTbfF
|
| I never use it though, because I take screenshot with
| CleanShot and then share directly in Slack / etc.
| moneywoes wrote:
| How does this compare to ShareX
| jimmyneptune wrote:
| ShareX is more feature-rich, but the settings are pretty
| convoluted. Flameshot is more easy to use and is available for
| Linux. I personally use ShareX on Windows and Flameshot on
| Linux.
| [deleted]
| Reventlov wrote:
| Not working completely as intended here (sway, nixos): it can
| take a single screenshot, and then later executions fail with
| those messages: http://0x0.st/-Z6n.txt
|
| I like the direct upload to imgur though.
| pricci wrote:
| Shutter is the only screenshot tool for Linux that meets my
| needs.
|
| But no Wayland support.
| denysvitali wrote:
| This is AWESOME news!
|
| I really love to see how well supported Wayland nowadays is.
| We're probably still missing a couple of things, but so far my
| experience has been fantastic.
| wheybags wrote:
| #1 problem for me is a combination of issues: - xwayland has no
| DPI scaling support (or rather, naive blurry pixel upscaling) -
| jebrains ides have no native Wayland support
|
| Result is a blurry mess of an ide. Once that is resolved, I'll
| be wholeheartedly aboard the Wayland train.
| denysvitali wrote:
| > jebrains ides have no native Wayland support
|
| I'm not sure about this statement to be honest, but maybe I
| never cared that much since xwayland works already good on my
| machines: have you tried with a custom JDK?
|
| I had some issues with sway and Jetbrains back in November,
| but I fixed those by running them on the latest JDK: https://
| github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/3007#issuecomment-7245...
|
| Granted that yes, probably it's not Wayland native, but using
| HiDPI in my case didn't seem to be a problem to be honest
| wheybags wrote:
| According to their bugtracker[1], there does still seem to
| be issues, but I hadn't looked in a while, and I'm glad to
| now see they plan to have it solved by end of the year \o/
|
| 1: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JBR-1315
| dmitrygr wrote:
| The year was 2021: Windows was starting again to support
| non-x86 hardware architectures, and Microsoft was shipping the
| best to Linux desktop experience. Mac OS shipped with the the
| fastest mobile processor in the world. Android basically owned
| the phone market.... Linux desktop was just getting somewhat
| working basic screenshot support.
| marcodiego wrote:
| The meme is good, but calling flameshot "somewhat working
| basic screenshot support" is an enormous understatement.
| auganov wrote:
| Yet, it doesn't have a proper highlighter pen. It draws a
| straight line and adds up. If you go over the same spot
| twice or more text might become unreadable and it will just
| look wrong. I have been unable to find a Linux screenshot
| tool that does it right. I use Flameshot on Linux too, but
| it's the least bad one in my book.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| To be fair screenshoting has always worked great and a larger
| part of the Linux community always adopts things well before
| they are ready.
|
| If you don't want sort of broken stuff don't use a distro
| that changes major versions every 6 months.
| denysvitali wrote:
| To be fair it was only Flameshot that was kind of missing
| Wayland support. There were / are other alternatives
| specifically made for Wayland: saying that the whole
| ecosystem was lagging behind becaude of this specific app is
| a bit of a stretch.
|
| But the meme is good, I'll give you that
| mplanchard wrote:
| Somewhat related, does anyone know of a working screen recorder
| for wayland? The gnome builtin one is broken on 20.04 and 20.10.
| There's a fix upstream, but it doesn't look like it's going to
| make it to the repos for a while yet
| lytedev wrote:
| OBS should work. I believe depending on your setup, you may
| need to setup Pipewire.
| leetrout wrote:
| Have you tried Peek?
|
| https://github.com/phw/peek
| seanperkins wrote:
| I also like peek.
| lttlrck wrote:
| it doesn't appear to support wayland
|
| https://github.com/phw/peek#why-no-native-wayland-support
| tgiba wrote:
| Doesn't work.
| ptaken wrote:
| Wfrecorder [0] is what I use, doesn't have a fancy gui but it
| just works
|
| 0: https://github.com/ammen99/wf-recorder
| dijit wrote:
| I use `wf-recorder`- it should work well, has worked well for
| me.
|
| https://github.com/ammen99/wf-recorder
| 0xCAP wrote:
| Flameshot is really great, man. One of my desert island tools
| definitely.
| robmsmt wrote:
| Glad this tool exists I have just moved to it. The main thing
| missing in my opinion to record a video as a gif.
| Forge36 wrote:
| Am I missing the hype?
| vanous wrote:
| Using it daily, Flameshot is great! Two wishes I would love to be
| able to add arrows to an existing, previously arrowed+labeled
| screenshot, rather then having to redo it again, so the style
| matches. Also, adding captured screenshots to the list of recent
| files (in his example Nautilus) would be awesome.
| ewokone wrote:
| Same here. Exactly my points on this great tool. Keep it up!
| social_quotient wrote:
| Kinda wish this and snag it would load to s3 and put the public
| url in my clipboard.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Does it capture a screenshot and then you edit the still frame?
| Or are you drawing onto a potentially changing background?
| mgbmtl wrote:
| Still frame.
|
| I set my print screen key to it, and works every time, instead
| of the built-in screenshot tool where the popups/menus will
| have disappeared.
| I_am_tiberius wrote:
| For users who like flameshot: I found ksnip even more compelling
| as it has more annotation features and tabs.
| ephbit wrote:
| Anyone else here who found Shutter to be quite handy?
|
| I tried flameshot once and don't really get how one would find
| it more useful than Shutter.
| I_am_tiberius wrote:
| I think flameshot is more for people who prefer design over
| functionality. Although the feature set is not too bad. Does
| shutter have annotation features?
| ephbit wrote:
| If by annotation you mean arrows, numbered circles, texts,
| coloured boxes and so on, then yes, it has.
| zmix wrote:
| I prefer such utilities to be native to the environment
| (typically OS) and tightly integrated.
| humanbeinc wrote:
| Windows is not a major OS anymore apparently
| detaro wrote:
| it runs on Windows too... Literally the second bullet point on
| the page is about Windows releases, would be kind of odd to
| list that if they didn't have Windows releases.
| DyslexicAtheist wrote:
| nice to have some alternatives to _grim_ [1] on Sway. Guess most
| people won't care, however I would not want my screenshot tool to
| be able to access the network.
|
| [1] https://github.com/emersion/grim
| swyx wrote:
| this was submitted a month ago -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26113753 i managed to build
| it for mac, but the dealbreaker was that text couldn't be moved.
| i'm sticking to Zapier's Zappy for now but even it has lacking
| features :( very close to writing my own...
| dleslie wrote:
| I like the innovation of having annotations available within the
| tool; but I make games, a video alternative with a timeline of
| annotations would be killer.
| rubee64 wrote:
| See ScreenToGif (amazing tool)
|
| https://www.screentogif.com/
|
| EDIT: Windows-only
| bhay wrote:
| I've used Flameshot for a while and can say it is definitely the
| best of many tools I've tried. The direct upload to imgur is
| particularly nice.
| samstave wrote:
| Is it better than Greenshot?
|
| https://i.imgur.com/ZtR60qw.png
|
| I love nesting screenshots into screenshots by simply hitting
| the PRTSC button muliple times
|
| https://i.imgur.com/9NKvWko.png
|
| https://i.imgur.com/n8Mwh1Z.png
|
| EDIT:
|
| ___
|
| And you should also install "hoverzoom" under brave broser with
| multiple blockers:
|
| https://i.imgur.com/OcOJhyE.jpg
| stilisstuk wrote:
| No. greenshot is fantastic. But windows only
| tex0 wrote:
| I'm so glad. I've been looking for a decent screenshot tool on
| linux for ... basically forever. This is so amazing.
|
| Thank you!
| rozab wrote:
| Why do people still use imgur after all the antipatterns
| they've pushed? When I tap the direct image links in this
| thread I get greeted with an extremely slow infinite scrolling
| page, social media features galore, and intrusive requests to
| install the _app_.
|
| I like postimages.org.
| dheera wrote:
| Yes, and the ability to annotate and block out parts of the
| image before saving. Simple tools that for some reason other
| screenshot tools have been mind-bogglingly oblivious to
| provide.
|
| (It has a blur tool too, but I don't recommend blurring
| sensitive data as if the area under the blur kernel is 1, the
| sum of the pixel values will be the same before and after the
| blur, and if an attacker recognizes which font and size it is
| from other parts of the screen, they use could dictionary
| attack for the text with the sum of the pixels as the hash to
| be cracked.)
| hojjat12000 wrote:
| I started using Wayland about a month ago on both my work
| computer and my laptop (On Pop_OS! 20.10). After seeing too much
| graphical glitches and weird behavior, specially because
| Alacritty (my favorite terminal) did not have any window
| decoration (I read through the whole issue on Gnome's issue
| tracker for server side decoration and got a little
| disappointed), I stopped using it on my work PC. But still I'm
| using it on my laptop. I haven't had any issues there, but I just
| use my laptop for some web surfing and zoom. Screen capture is a
| hassle too. I was trying to capture only a part of my screen and
| had to do an hour worth of research to finally decide to just
| switch to X.org and get the job done. It's great that Flameshot
| is now supporting Wayland, and it's great that it is trying to
| support all the common protocols.
| isitdopamine wrote:
| Don't get me wrong, Flameshot is a great tool, but this feels a
| bit like celebrating every turn after reinventing the wheel.
| znpy wrote:
| it kinda is.
|
| the whole wayland ecosystem is slowling taking shape month
| after month. and given the radical change that wayland is, most
| thing have to be re-implemented using radically different
| tooling, libraries and approaches, which is very similar to re-
| inventing.
| ajross wrote:
| Major distros have been shipping wayland as the default
| backend for almost five years! I mean, yes, it's a lot of
| work. But it was wildly premature, and the community support
| for this stuff has been nothing short of a disaster of apathy
| and ignorance.
|
| Which is to say: what you say is true, but there's no excuse
| for breaking screenshots (!) for half a decade in the name of
| "progress".
|
| (And I say that as someone who genuinely thinks Wayland
| itself is great software. But the desktop projects and
| distros have a job to do too, and they didn't.)
| jgillich wrote:
| Really only Fedora has shipped Wayland by default for five
| years, and they do this with a lot of other tech as well
| (GNOME 3 and Cgroups v2 to name some more). If there is no
| user demand, nobody wants to do the work of supporting new
| technology, which is why Fedora releases things _before_
| they are ready. Anyone using Fedora should know this.
| dleslie wrote:
| > Which is to say: what you say is true, but there's no
| excuse for breaking screenshots (!) for half a decade in
| the name of "progress".
|
| Breaking, or wholly removing, loved and important features
| because the developers believe they know better is sort of
| the modus operandi of the Gnome team; and don't you dare
| file a bug report. They don't accept criticism graciously.
|
| See also: file picker icons, desktop icons, task tray, et
| cetera.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| This is sadly spreading... you have a thing, that is old,
| well tested, and works (and had worked for years).... but
| someone wants to reimplement this same thing in Rust, or
| whatever language of the day, because it's "safer" than
| (eg.) C... so you get something that has 40% of the
| features of the old software, 20% of the features that
| were done with another standard software, and one or two
| really important features missing.... but developer and
| distro-makers don't care, because it's "modern" and
| written in Rust (or whatever).
| dleslie wrote:
| > A _modern_ tool for blah blah.
|
| I generally parse this as half-baked, not battle-tested,
| and difficult to use.
| swyx wrote:
| question for those out of the loop - what is Wayland? how is
| it related to Flameshot? it is mentioned but not explained in
| the post.
| entropie wrote:
| It claims to be the successor to xorg. For like 5+ years
| now.
| valid_username wrote:
| I am not able to use it on sway with default swaybar. The
| notification simply says "Unable to capture screen" when I click
| on the tray icon. From CLI also I tried a few commands but
| nothing happens. No errors as well. Can you please help me?
| libco wrote:
| seems like xdg-desktop-portal-wlr depends on having grim
| installed. At least it started working for me when I installed
| grim edit: maybe not, is still only works sometimes
| gideon13 wrote:
| 0.9.x still has quite a few issues including not working well
| on scaled hidpi setups on Wayland.
|
| https://github.com/flameshot-org/flameshot/issues
|
| https://github.com/flameshot-org/flameshot/issues/1408
| codethief wrote:
| Is this Wayland-only or does it also work with X and a window
| manager like i3?
| jcastro wrote:
| I've been using this with X for years, great tool!
| wrnr wrote:
| The auto incrementing label is very cool, im glad your enjoying
| yourself.
| gspr wrote:
| I don't wanna poop on their parade, but haven't Wayland
| screenshotters been around for a while?
| https://github.com/emersion/grim
|
| That one has at least been around for long enough, and has worked
| perfectly under Sway for long enough, that I had to look up its
| name because I had it bound to a hotkey and had forgotten what it
| was called.
| solarkraft wrote:
| grim (awesome together with slurp and wl-clipboard) only works
| on wlroots. Flameshot aims to be cross-desktop compatible _and_
| is a GUI tool.
| jhvkjhk wrote:
| Reading grim's README, it looks like a terminal tool, while
| flameshot is a GUI tool. You mean flameshot should just wrap
| grim on wayland?
| Arnavion wrote:
| grim can write the image to stdout. GUI like [1] can read
| images from stdin. You can make a script that pipes one to
| the other and bind that in your compositor.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/jtheoof/swappy
| wongarsu wrote:
| The website doesn't really make it clear, but it supports
| Windows, MacOS and Linux (in all flavors).
|
| Even though Windows now has a quite good screenshot story out-of-
| the-box with the Win+Shift+S shortcut, Flameshot seems to have
| some very nice annotation options that I haven't seen anywhere
| else.
| nguyenkien wrote:
| ShareX is native option in Windows, support screenshot,
| annotation, record screen as gif or video. And can upload to
| many services
| josteink wrote:
| Just to be clear: there exist lots of other screenshot tools
| which has supports Wayland, so this isn't the _first_ or only
| tool which does so.
|
| Always nice to see more tools support Wayland though.
|
| For now I'm still happy with grim and how it integrates into my
| swaywm setup.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| Anyone knows how to bind the printscreen key to automated
| flameshot screenshoting ? (using awesome/sway/thingslikethat).
|
| I'd like to emulate spectacle (kde screenshot tool) that allows a
| 2 seconds delay between rectangular area or application to be
| screenshoted.
| _ikke_ wrote:
| For AwesomeWM, I have this in my rc.lua in the globalkeys
| table: awful.key({ }, "Print", function ()
| awful.spawn("flameshot gui") end, {description
| = "Make a screenshot (relies on flameshot)", group =
| "clipboard"})
| RealStickman_ wrote:
| In i3 (and therefor sway) you can use bindsym. I don't know it
| off the top of my head, but it should be easy enough to find.
| The "-d" option with flameshot is used to have delays.
| [deleted]
| solarkraft wrote:
| Tangentially related, here's my screenshot command for grim
| that you could easily build a sleep into:
|
| command_screenshot_interactive = grim -g "$(slurp)" - | tee
| $(xdg-user-dir DOCUMENTS)/screencap/$(date
| +%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ).png | wl-copy
| elyobo wrote:
| Recently gave up on Wayland (for the moment) due to the inability
| to screen share most applications on Google Meet. I realise this
| isn't really Wayland's fault, but that doesn't really solve my
| problem.
| KitDuncan wrote:
| I can share screen with pipewire on Google Meet. It's not
| perfect, because you can select specific windows, but it works.
| vcxy wrote:
| Agreed, this is where I'm at as well. In general, I actually
| found sway to be wonderful, but it's not worth the hassle of
| switching over anytime I have a meeting where I could possibly
| need to screen share.
| StavrosK wrote:
| Hmm, funny I should see this here after TeMPOraL mentioned it to
| me a few days ago. It looks much better than Shutter, which I use
| now. I'll try to write an IMGZ plugin for it, one-shot image
| upload and copying the URL to the clipboard would be fantastic.
| djhworld wrote:
| I wish this tool existed on MacOS, being able to annotate
| screenshots in such a fluid manner was a great feature on Linux.
| flixic wrote:
| - It supports macOS
|
| - macOS has even better tools built in
|
| - If that's not enough, try CleanShot
| seppel wrote:
| Literally the first sentence of the linked page is "Improved
| MacOS support. MacOS is now officially supported and we will
| resolve any reported issues on this platform."
|
| However, I think build-in screenshot tools (that even can take
| videos) in Macos are already quite powerful. What do you miss?
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| I haven't looked in awhile, so maybe Mac has some of these
| now
|
| - immediate jump into editor after taking screenshot, with...
|
| - text annotations
|
| - arrow annotations
|
| - box/circle annotations
|
| - BLUR
|
| - upload to imgur
|
| - copy to clipboard
| evanriley wrote:
| Shift-Command-[3,4,5]?
|
| Unless this does something that I'm not seeing, macOS has this
| tool builtin
| edwinyzh wrote:
| Great to have discovered this nice tool! After fiddle it for a
| while, it doesn't seem to be able to select specific window and
| capture?
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(page generated 2021-03-13 23:02 UTC)