Ubuntu 14.04 screenshots with LXDE

Question

Recently I replaced Unity with LXDE on my Ubuntu 14.04. Experience so far is pretty good, a lot of troubles with Unity before have gone.

One thing missing though, I regularily used Shift+PrintScreen to capture some part of the screen. It worked before with Unity, but now it doesn't work any more on LXDE. Anyone has an idea how to make it work on LXDE? Thanks.

Answer 1

How thoroughly did you "replace Unity with LXDE"? I'm asking because it isn't clear which program you're using to get the screen capture.

In a pure LXDE situation --- Lubuntu is the LXDE+Openbox distro supported here as an official flavor --- scrot is the default program to take screenshots.

man scrot has this:

-s, --select  
  Interactively select a window or rectangle with the mouse.

It's then up to you to set up the appropriate keybinds in your rc.xml file (or whatever it's called) which should be in ~/.config/openbox. And you can read about rc.xml here.

I have separate keybindings for instant and time-delayed screenshots. I haven't set up binding for interactive selection because I rarely need that and prefer to keep a copy of the full screen for "legal" reasons. In any case, setting up a keybind for a specific purpose is simple.

But here's one way using Shift+PrintScreen

<keybind key="S-Print">        # Interactive
  <action name="Execute"><command>scrot -s -q 100 ~/Pictures/%Y%m%d%H%M%S.png</command></action>
</keybind>

In this,

• -s enables the interactive mode
• q 100 produces the best quality image while 75 is the default
• ~/Pictures/%Y%m%d%H%M%S.png is the filename using strftime (explained in man strftime). Of course, you can choose another destination folder or filename.

And I guess it isn't necessary to point out that Lubuntu is a "slim" distro and may not have all the facilities that distros with DEs such as Unity, GNOME, KDE, or MATE offer.