Some shortcuts to take screenshots are not working

[Odyseus]

Some shortcuts to take screenshots are not working

Hello, everybody.

The keyboard shortcuts Shift+Print (Take a screenshot of an area) and Ctrl+Shift+Print (Copy a screenshot of an area to clipboard) they work sporadically. The Print key some times needs to be pressed 2/3 (some times even more) times consecutively while holding Shift for the mouse cursor to enter into selection mode.

Some notes

• Using gnome-screenshot -a on a terminal works 100% of the time. Although, a warning message can be seen on the terminal (* Message: Unable to select area using GNOME Shell's builtin screenshot interface, resorting to fallback X11.)*.
• In the live system these shortcuts have the same problem. But I only tested the live system on a VirtualBox virtual machine.
• If I assign a new custom keyboard shortcut to run the gnome-screenshot -a command, it has the exact same problem than the default shortcut.
• If I assign a new custom keyboard shortcut to run a script file containing the gnome-screenshot -a command, it has the exact same problem than the default shortcut.

My system information

• Operating System: Linux Mint 18 Cinnamon 64-bit
• Cinnamon Version: 3.0.7
• Linux Kernel: 4.4.0-21-generic
• Processor: AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 955 Processor × 4
• Memory: 6.8 GiB
• Hard Drives: 1936.6 GB
• Graphics Card: NVIDIA Corporation G94 [GeForce 9600 GT]

[xenopeek]

Related to #3981 (which notes a related issue in MATE).

Some observations about shift+print on Linux Mint 18 Cinnamon 3.0.7:

• Hold down shift key and quickly/shortly tap the print key seems to always work. A longer press of the print key doesn't always work.
• If the desktop has input focus (click on it to give it focus) but no icon on it is selected/highlighted, shift+print always works regardless how long you press the print key. If an icon on the desktop is selected/highlighted it doesn't always work unless you only quickly/shortly tap the print key.
• It doesn't work at all if you have opened a menu.

A possible workaround reported on the forums is to bind the keyboard shortcut to a custom script that inserts a short delay:

#!/bin/sh

sleep 0.125
gnome-screenshot --area

[JosephMcc]

I'm going to go ahead and close this one as a duplicate. The issue linked by xenopeek gives pretty much all the same info.

[Odyseus]

Hello, g@ys.

@xenopeek: Thanks for the link and the workarounds. I can confirm that the script with the delay works 100% of the time. The other workarounds also worked on some degree, but they are kind of annoying to take into account and use them on a daily basis. Thanks again.

@JosephMcc: Very sorry for wasting your time with a known issue. It seems that I didn't do a very good job at searching for this. I will be more careful in the future and search more thoroughly the current issues before reporting here. Thanks, JosephMcc.

[JosephMcc]

It isn't always easy to find duplicates. I get help from others locating them and sometimes just remember there is one, so I know what I'm look for beforehand.