One of the first things I need to get working is the screenshots. They are needed to help document what I do with the OS. Normally, I’m used to Flameshot. Gnome has a pretty good one, but Flameshot adds some better annotations and features. Now that I’m in Garuda/KDE the world is different. It comes preinstalled with Spectacle.
Editing and Annotating
Spectacle has the basics. I can push the Print screen button and get a screenshot. After taking the screenshot, you can easily annotate it with the Edit button.
The most important ones that I like are the square, circle, and arrow. These make it easy to communicate what to look at on the screenshot. Since Spectacle takes the whole screen by default, the crop tool is pretty handy too.
Pin Feature
One feature that Flameshot has but Spectacle does not is the Pin option. I did notice that it has been requested: Bug 470369 – Add “Pin Screenshot” Functionality to Spectacle.
Now, when you take a screenshot with Spectacle, it does put it into a window. The only difference is that the window doesn’t float above everything else the way it would if you pin a screenshot on Flameshot.
You could use the “Keep Above Others” option to accomplish the same affect. The only problem is that you get the other parts of the Spectacle window (title bar, toolbar, and buttons on the right) along with your screenshot.
Launching Spectacle
By default, when you press the screenshot button, it will launch Spectacle with a screenshot of the whole screen. Or, when I’m on my dock, it will have all three screens. From that point, you can either crop the shot to the one part you want, or you can use one of the buttons on the right. For example, you can click the “Rectangular Region” button to get it to act like Flameshot.
There are shortcuts for thoses thing. You have to remember that “Meta” is the super key / windows key on your keyboard.
The only issue is that if you use the keyboard shortcut rather than the buttons on the app, it will automatically save the shot to your screenshots folder. You don’t get to annotate it, and it creates extra files, which you wouldn’t need if you are planning to just paste your shot into a document or email.
Running Flameshot
So, my next question is: can I actually run Flameshot on KDE / Garuda? I tried to install it from Octopi, and I did not select the optional packages.
And, it worked! I can run “flameshot gui” from the command line, and I get to take a screenshot the same way it worked for me on my old Ubuntu desktop.
I decided to keep Spectacle on the Print Screen key. Instead, I added Flameshot to Ctrl+Alt+P. Now, I can use both. As you can see below, I did this on the settings up under Input & Output > Keyboard.
