FOSSPicks

Screenshot taker

Flameshot

It's amazing that, for a simple tool, the humble screenshot utility hasn't found perfection and ascended to ubiquity years ago. We could all agree that the copy-to-clipboard approach of the PrntScr key on Windows needed improvement, as could the name of Scrot, but it's been harder to find innovation since Spectacle took over from KSnapshot. But there's a new contender, and it's gone straight to the top of the pile. Flameshot gets nearly everything right, and more importantly, it does this without getting anything wrong. The brilliant HotShots gets close, for instance, with its ability to annotate and edit images before they're saved. But saving is convoluted enough to make it a pain to use, despite the advantages.

Flameshot avoids these pitfalls and has even innovated over HotShots. There's a separate configuration tool for setting things like the GUI colors, the buttons that appear, and exactly how screenshots are named when saved. You can then take screenshots with or without the GUI appearing, but it's the GUI that makes this such a good tool. When Flameshot is launched and you select a screen area to grab, that area is immediately highlighted and then augmented by a series of buttons (configured earlier) that let you annotate, sketch, heal, resize, draw lines, and undo any changes you make. You can do all of this before the image is automatically saved or uploaded. The only function it's really missing is the ability to create automatic annotations like you can with HotShots, but apart from that, it's perfect. As it's Qt-based rather than KDE-based, it's also desktop agnostic and even supports Gnome Wayland and Plasma Wayland alongside the usual suspects. If there is one thing it's missing, it's a delay period. Otherwise, it's perfect.

Project Website

https://github.com/lupoDharkael/flameshot

Flameshot must be the most comprehensive screen tool to support Gnome Wayland and Plasma Wayland.

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