xwdui

A tiny crummy UI for xwd, the X Window Dump utility (It takes screenshots).

There's also a newer version which uses ffmpeg instead, which appears to be more suited to taking screenshots on systems using compositors.

You will have to change the path to the file to save the last run's settings in from within the .py scripts. Other than that it shouldn't be too difficult to set up. Ask if you have problems. I mostly wrote this for myself so it's definitely a bit strange to set up. Once set up it should work fine though.

If you are having it just not start up properly, try forging a 'last run' file. That's the file name set in the poorly-named 'fileName' variable in the .py scripts.

You can now use a script I wrote called create-state-file to automate this, or manually do the following. The file should be ${HOME}/.xwdui.

The file should have the format of:

[line 1] /path/to/directory/to/save/screenshots/in/ [newline]
[line 2] [empty by default; causes the screenshot program to give screenshots
         timestamps for file names. Alternatively, can be 'filename.png']
         [ newline, only if line 2 is non-empty ]

with a unix-style newline (\n) separating the two fields.

It needs Imagemagick to work (it uses the convert utility to convert a XWD-format file to a PNG image).

I wrote this primarily for use in CDE, the old commercial Unix desktop. With that said, I think it should work on pretty much any X window manager. I have personally been using it in FVWM without issues recently.

To make this work in CDE, if you don't already have a file called ~/.dt/dtwmrc, copy one from the system installation dir (e.g. /usr/dt/config/C/sys.dtwmrc).

Key bindings in a selection of window managers

CDE (Common Desktop Environment)

To make it work in CDE, I made part of my dtwmrc (~/.dt/dtwmrc) look like this:

Keys DtKeyBindings
{
    <key>Print         root|icon|window        f.exec /home/wyatt/bin/xwdui.py
    Alt<key>Print      root|icon|window        f.exec /home/wyatt/bin/xwdui-root.py
    [the stuff that was already in this section goes here]
}

That let me use my "Print Screen" key to take screenshots of windows.

For full-screen screenshots, I set a separate keybinding for xwdui-root.py, which mapped to alt-PrintScreen. This went in the same DtKeyBindings section, as seen in the example above.

FVWM (FVWM2)

For FVWM, I edited my ~/.fvwm2rc file to include the following lines:

# Print Screen
Silent Key Print A A Exec exec /home/wyatt/bin/xwdui.py
# Alt-Print Screen (fullscreen screenshot)
Silent Key Print A M Exec exec /home/wyatt/bin/xwdui-root.py

The keyword Silent is not strictly necessary, but suppresses errors on keyboards which don't have a Print Screen key.

MATE

This can be done multiple ways in MATE, but the easiest is probably to run mate-keybinding-properties and set it to run your script there via the GUI interface.

Other options would include setting it up manually using dconf (CLI) or dconf-editor (GUI).

Alternatively, MATE already has a screenshot tool built-in, which is what my cheap little tool is meant to be a partial clone of. It was the inspiration for my design. It's better than my tool in most ways, so using that instead would be a viable option.

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Those are all of the desktop environments I have used in recent times. If you can't figure out how to do it in yours, ask me in a bug report and I'll try to figure it out for you if I can.