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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).

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Augustin Riedinger
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3 Answers3

7

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](https://linuxmint.com) but the bug is hard to solve hence is here to stay. – Augustin Riedinger Dec 05 '19 at 18:53