es:Screen capture ja:スクリーンキャプチャ pt:Screen capture ru:Screen capture zh-hans:Screen capture

This article lists and describes screenshot and screencast software.

Screenshot software

Dedicated software

Application list

Usage

maim

maim is aimed to be an improved scrot.

Save the full screen to file:

$ maim filename

Prompt for selection and save to file:

$ maim --select filename

Save the active window to file, assuming xdotool is installed:

$ maim --window $(xdotool getactivewindow) filename

Prompt for selection, save without cursor, and store it to clipboard, assuming xclip is installed:

$ maim -s | xclip -selection clipboard -t image/png -i

scrot

scrot enables taking screenshots from the CLI and offers features such as a user-definable time delay. Unless instructed otherwise, it saves the file in the current working directory.

$ scrot -t 20 -d 5

The above command saves a dated .png file, along with a thumbnail (20% of original), for Web posting. It provides a 5 second delay before capturing in this instance.

You can also use standard date and time formatting when saving to a file. e.g.,

$ scrot ~/screenshots/%Y-%m-%d-%T-screenshot.png

saves the screenshot in a filename with the current year, month, date, hours, minutes, and seconds to a folder in your home directory called "screenshots"

See scrot(1) for more information.

Desktop environment specific

Budgie

Budgie ships with its own screenshot utility called BudgieScreenshot.

It allows capturing the whole screen using PrintScreen, the active window or a selected area. See Keyboard Shortcuts for the shortcut to a specific action.

Cinnamon

The default installation of Cinnamon does not provide a screenshot utility. Installing gnome-screenshot will enable screenshots through the Menu > Accessories > Screenshot or by pressing PrintScreen.

GNOME

GNOME users can press PrintScreen or click the camera icon in the system menu. You can also optionally install gnome-screenshot and open it via Apps > Accessories > Take Screenshot.

GNOME features built-in screen recording with the Ctrl+Shift+Alt+r key combination. A red circle is displayed in the bottom right corner of the screen when the recording is in progress. After the recording is finished, a file named Screencast from %d%u-%c.webm is saved in the Videos directory. In order to use the screencast feature the gst-plugin-pipewire and gst-plugins-good packages need to be installed.

KDE

If you use KDE, you might want to use Spectacle.

Spectacle is provided by the spectacle package.

Xfce

If you use Xfce you can install xfce4-screenshooter and then add a keyboard binding:

Xfce Menu > Settings > Keyboard > Application Shortcuts

If you want to skip the Screenshot prompt, type $ xfce4-screenshooter -h in terminal for the options.

Other desktop environments or window managers

For other desktop environments such as LXDE or window managers such as Openbox and Compiz, one can add the above commands to the hotkey to take the screenshot. For example:

$ import -window root ~/Pictures/$(date '+%Y%m%d-%H%M%S').png

Note that import is part of the imagemagick package. Adding the above command to the PrintScreen key to Compiz allows to take the screenshot to the Pictures folder according to date and time.

Note that <command> in Openbox does not pass the string to a shell, so in order to run the subcommand, you need to run sh manually. For example, add the following to the keyboard section of your rc.xml file:

<!-- Screenshot -->
<keybind key="Print">
  <action name="Execute">
    <command>sh -c "import -window root ~/Pictures/$(date '+%Y%m%d-%H%M%S').png"</command>
  </action>
</keybind>

rc.xml

If the PrintScreen above does not work, see Keyboard input and use different keysym or keycode.

Packages including a screenshot utility

ImageMagick/GraphicsMagick

See ImageMagick#Screenshot taking.

GIMP

You also can take screenshots with GIMP (File > Create > Screenshot...).

imlib2

imlib2 provides a binary imlib2_grab to take screenshots. To take a screenshot of the full screen, type:

$ imlib2_grab screenshot.png

FFmpeg

See FFmpeg#Screen capture.

Screencast software

See also FFmpeg#Screen capture and Wikipedia:Comparison of screencasting software.

Screencast utilities allow you to create a video of your desktop or individual windows.

• obs-gnome-screencast – plugin for GNOME screencast feature, supports Wayland

Annotation and visualization tools

Some tools that can be used to annotate things during screencasts or show elements like pressed keys, or mouse activity. See List of applications/Other#On-screen annotation.

Wayland

Capturing the screen on Wlroots-based compositor can be done using:

• grim or grimshot (from sway-contrib) for screenshots

• gscreenshot (whole screen only)

• wf-recorder or obs-studio for video

• xfce4-screenshooter

• screengrab (full/rectangular part of screen)

• flameshot works, need to select grim for capture in configuration GUI

Optionally, slurp can be used to select the part of the screen to capture. If your GPU supports vaapi encoding, wl-screenrec can be a more efficient alternative to wf-recorder.

Screenshot

Take a screenshot of the whole screen:

$ grim screenshot.png

Take a screenshot of current window in Sway:

$ swaymsg -t get_tree | jq -r '.. | select(.focused?) | .rect | "\(.x),\(.y) \(.width)x\(.height)"' | grim -g - screenshot.png

Take a screenshot of current window in Hyprland:

$ hyprctl -j activewindow | jq -r '"\(.at[0]),\(.at[1]) \(.size[0])x\(.size[1])"' | grim -g - screenshot.png

Take a screenshot of a part of the screen:

$ slurp | grim -g - screenshot.png

Take a screenshot of a part of the screen and put the output into the clipboard using wl-clipboard:

$ slurp | grim -g - - | wl-copy

Take a screenshot of a part of the screen, save to a file, and put the output into the clipboard using wl-clipboard:

$ slurp | grim -g - - | tee ~/Pictures/$(date +%s).png | wl-copy

Screencasting

• vokoscreen now supports both Qt (it's base environment) and GNOME Desktop Environments (DE) for screencast screen, window or screen area. The DE will open a window asking to accept access (fullscreen for fullscreen or cropped part, window, for window) at each new record on GNOME.

Via GNOME screencast

green-recorder, obs-gnome-screencast and obs-studio support screen recording on Wayland using GNOME screencast feature.

Via the WebRTC protocol

See PipeWire#WebRTC screen sharing.

Chromium and Firefox should now be able to access the screenshare. You can verify this through Mozilla's getUserMedia / getDisplayMedia Test Page.

Hyprland

The Hyprland window manager allows screen casting and recording with OBS (including selection of individual windows and workspaces) when used with xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland https://wiki.hyprland.org/Useful-Utilities/Screen-Sharing/.

Sway

Configuration for screen sharing with selection on Sway is covered by default in /usr/share/xdg-desktop-portal/sway-portals.conf.

Other wlroots based compositors

Capture a video of the whole screen with filename recording.mp4 (the default is recording.mkv):

$ wf-recorder -f recording.mp4

Capture a video of a part of the screen:

$ wf-recorder -g "$(slurp)"

for those on a different wlroots based compositors, such as dwl: you will need to do the following,

install xdg-desktop-portal-wlr with the gtk version then follow XDG Desktop Portal#Configuration with PipeWire installed then restart

See PipeWire#WebRTC screen sharing.

Via a virtual webcam video feed

See v4l2loopback#Casting Wayland using wf-recorder.

Install wf-recorder (or wf-recorder-git) and v4l2loopback-dkms. Load the v4l2loopback kernel module with the following parameters:

# modprobe v4l2loopback exclusive_caps=1 card_label=VirtualVideoDevice

Verify that a new virtual video device VirtualVideoDevice has been created:

...
VirtualVideoDevice (platform:v4l2loopback-000):
	/dev/video2
...

$ v4l2-ctl --list-devices

Start recording the screen with wf-recorder and feed the output to the new virtual video device VirtualVideoDevice created by v4l2loopback:

$ wf-recorder --muxer=v4l2 --codec=rawvideo --file=/dev/video2 -x yuv420p

The yuv420p colour space is required for the video output to be compatible with Zoom https://github.com/ammen99/wf-recorder/pull/43.

You can now select the above virtual video device as your "webcam" in video calling/video conferencing applications (the device is called VirtualVideoDevice). You can use ffplay (part of ffmpeg), mpv, or gst-launch (part of gstreamer) to verify that the virtual video device indeed outputs your screenshare:

$ ffplay /dev/video2

$ mpv av://v4l2:/dev/video2

$ gst-launch-1.0 -v v4l2src device=/dev/video2 ! glimagesink

If Firefox is unable to read the video stream and prints a message like "AbortError: Starting video failed", try preloading v4l2compat.so:

$ LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/v4l1compat.so firefox

Sharing individual applications

As explained above, wf-recorder is able to record only a portion of the screen by first selecting a region with slurp. To use this functionality for sharing a specific region/application window through a virtual video device, start recording the screen with the following modified command:

$ wf-recorder -g "$(slurp)" --muxer=v4l2 --codec=rawvideo --file=/dev/video2 -x yuv420p

After selecting a region of the screen, you will be able to access the video feed through the virtual video device /dev/video2 as above.

Screencast Wayland windows with X11 applications

You can share native Wayland windows (or the whole screen/workspace) to the X11 application. For this you need to use xwaylandvideobridge. See Fixing Wayland: Xwayland screen casting for details.

Terminal

Capture with ANSI codes

You can use the script(1) command, part of the util-linux package. Just run script and from that moment, all the output is going to be saved to the typescript file, including the ANSI codes.

Once you are done, just run exit and the typescript would ready. The resulting file can be converted to HTML using the ansi2html package (not to be confused with ansi2html from python-ansi2html).

To convert the typescript file to typescript.html, do the following:

$ ansi2html --bg=dark < typescript > typescript.html

Actually, some commands can be piped directly to ansi2html:

$ ls --color|ansi2html --bg=dark >output.html

That does not work on every single case, so in those cases, using script is mandatory.

Framebuffer

Use fbgrab or fbdump to take a screenshot.

Virtual console

Screenshot

If you merely want to capture the text in the console and not an actual image, you can use setterm, which is part of the util-linux package. The following command will dump the textual contents of virtual console 1 to a file screen.dump in the current directory:

# setterm -dump 1 -file screen.dump

Root permission is needed because the contents of /dev/vcs1 need to be read.

Screencast of console

asciinema allows to record a whole terminal session activity, which is saved in a file in its own (open) format. This file can be played with the same tool or an HTML5 version of the tool, and can be shared on the asciinema.org official web site of the application, or on any own hosted HTML version.

Usage: asciinema(1) or asciinema --help.

• asciinema rec output.cast records the session, Ctrl+\ can pause/resume it, Ctrl-d/exit of the session will stop it. Name of output file is optional.

Interesting arguments for recording:

• -c command if you just want to record a specific command action/output

• -i 1.2 record for 1.2 seconds only

• -t "beautiful title" add a title to the terminalcast

Other functions than recording:

• asciinema play file.cast play an asciinema record file

• asciinema upload file.cast upload the file on asciinema.org for sharing

• asciinema auth manage recordings on asciinema.org account

Troubleshooting

Screenshot uses old screen state

See KDE#Spectacle screenshot uses old screen state.

NVIDIA clipping background

If the NVIDIA driver is in use and the screen recording is experiencing background clipping, enable the ForceCompositionPipeline setting. See NVIDIA/Troubleshooting#Avoid screen tearing for details.