by Hey there! Although I was extremely busy with my current full-time job, I didn’t want to miss this opportunity to share something that I found useful on Linux and there’s no out of the box solution like on Windows when you use Shift+Windows+S for capturing parts of your screen and then highlighting stuff.
The context
On Windows, I always enjoyed the builtin feature of taking screenshots to parts of the screen and then be able to highlight things that you want. It’s so trivial that you only need to know the magic shortcut: Shift+Win+S. And voila!
I’m a big fan of Linux Mint and I started during the pandemic to work with it intensively because I love the simplicity, the stability and … the command line. I am quite productive in Mint but I found I missed something from Windows; and that is the ability to use a shortcut to take screenshots from parts of the screen.
The solution
I digged in a little bit and although you have to work a bit to make it work, but the outcome is better than what you find on Windows 😁
After testing a couple of programs that take screenshots, I’ve found flameshot, which is exactly what I wanted. You can install it by running this command:
$ sudo apt-get install -y flameshotWhen you run flameshot, it will appear in the bottom-right side of the taskbar and by right-clicking it, you can take the screenshots. This tool is very good, it only lacks a shortcut to activate it. But I’ll show you how to achieve this.
Activating the tool with a shortcut
We all know Linux is highly configurable and that’s why I love it! Flameshot has a command line via which it can be called, the only thing that needs to be done is to create the shortcut. If you go to Shortcuts in your settings you’ll be able to configure there custom shortcuts. Mine looks like this:
Here I’ve added a new keyboard mapping by using the “Add custom shortcut” button with the name Screenshot and the command to call: flameshot gui. It basically looks like this:
And as shortcut I’ve used Shift+Alt+S. You can use whatever combination you like, it’s up to you. Now try your combination and you should be able to take screenshots, adjust the size, highlight and many more!
Conclusions
You can draw the conclusions for yourself and you’ll reach to the same conclusion: Linux is very versatile and highly configurable. It’s very productive but to make it your very own, you need to do some extra work for which I’m certain you’ll be very proud of in the end 😉
The next thing I really miss from Windows is the ability to have a keyboard just for emojis. This keyboard can be shown in Windows by pressing Win+. (dot). I also find this extremely useful, but for now I didn’t manage to investigate how to emulate it. For sure the solution might be better than the Windows implementation.
Thanks for reading, I hope you found this article useful and interesting. If you have any suggestions don’t hesitate to contact me. If you found my content useful please consider a small donation. Any support is greatly appreciated! Cheers 😉
