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I have discovered Scrot and it really has made it easier to take screenshots of my system.
Scrot is in most repos I have found it in Manjaro Mageia and OpenMandriva so far.

All you have to do is:

This will create a date and time stamp pic.

If you want to name it and decide the format you can do so:

And the snapshot of your desktop is saved on your computer under the name desktop.png you can also call it Desktop.png or something else.

How is this easier than simply pressing Prnt scr you say? Eh well it isn't - it is pretty much the same.
So how about this:
What if I want to make a screenschot of my desktop and thumbnail of it at the same time?
That is no problem:

by adding - t (for thumbnail) and 10 for 10 % of the original picture; the magic happens.
desktop.png and desktop-thumb.png are created.

Now that is a bit harder with regular print screen. But since this is a terminal program; how fancy do all your snapshots look when the terminal is always in it?
Not very cool I am afraid
We can fix that too with a delay, by using the -d switch like this:

This will give you a delay of 3 seconds to hide the terminal - there are no prizes for guessing what to do if you need 10 seconds

If you want the thumb too; your command would be:


The pictures will be saved in the location you are standing. If you like you can put a path in the command.

This will save your snapshots in ~/Pictures/scrot.

Scrot takes snapshot with 75 % quality. If you want that superduper pic with 100 % quality you can do so with the -q switch

Again: there are no prizes for guessing what to do if you want 90 % quality

But wait that is not all.....

.....

Scrot can also take screenshots of areas of your desktop

All you have to do is using the -s switch

Now scrot will wait for you to mark the area you want to take a screenshot of, with your mouse, and take the shot as soon as you are finished marking.

It works well, but it is kind of a silent operation so I needed to look at the directory in Thunar to make sure that the snapshot was actually taken.
To make Scrot tell us what happens we can add the - c switch. It is a countdown for the delay that also adds some additional info like "done".

So this command never leaves any doubt:

The output will be something like this:

So this is a nice little wizard that takes care of screenshots; try this one to make a snapshot of an area:


If you like it save it as an alias and put a path in there so your snapshots always are saved in the same place - something like this:

Here is the result of my ashot command where I selected a bit of the screen - The pic is full size.

Here is a pic of my dropdown terminal, to show that you can also select areas within a terminal:



Or even within a VirtualBox client.

Great stuff, I tell you

You do not have to select an area with mouse when using the -s switch; You can simply pick an entire window by clicking on it (without holding in the left mouse key and draging).
Here I picked the Terminal window:

And here is my Scrot directory shown in the Thunar window:

All you have to do is a;
and click on a window.
Or simply hit ALT+F2 and type scrot -s

Scrot is ideal for low spec machines.
You can check how it compares to imagemagic here:

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