It is a mistake to think that only “big” things (supported hardware, multimedia codecs, office applications and data conversion) matter when you want to successfully switch to an alternative operating system. For true happiness^TM, the small things are as, or even more, important – the things that make your daily work routine run smoothly and that you’ll only miss once you don’t have them anymore…

Taking screenshots is one of these small things. Everybody who develops digital tools and applications for end users will sooner or later reach the point where good visual documentation is needed – no matter how intuitive the user interface might be. And everybody who ever had to compile such an illustrated manual or wiki knows just how helpful a good screenshot tool is.

Running linux, this was one of the small things I always missed…

Enter Shutter

Shutter (formerly known as GScrot) has recently been released in version 0.70.2 and is, despite its short history, already the best linux screenshot tool around, IMO. But let’s have a closer look at what makes Shutter a screenshot tool deluxe:

Basic functionality: taking screenshots

With shutter, you can

• capture a selected area from your screen. You have two options:
  • in  simple mode, you click in the screen, hold the mouse button and draw a rectangle. On releasing the mouse button, the selected area is captured. For better orientation, Shutter zooms the region around the cursor and shows the coordinates and the dimensions of the area selected so far.
  • in extended mode, you also draw a rectangle area as described before, but you can modify its dimensions before it is captured. For better orientation, Shutter fades out the parts of the screen that you did not select.
• capture your entire screen.
• capture single windows. And it is easy, instead of having to arrange them manually on your desktop, Shutter offers you a list of all existing windows and you simply pick the one you want to capture.
• capture window parts. With this option, Shutter lets you easily select only parts of a window, e.g. Firefox’s navigation bar.
• capture a complete website. All you need is the URL of the web page you want to capture. Shutter takes a screenshot of the whole page, no matter what size – so no more patching of multiple screenshots for long pages.

You can fine tune these basic functions. If you need to arrange something on your screen before you capture it, define a specific delay time. If you need to take a whole series of screenshots that document a specific process, define a wildcard naming pattern – Shutter offers you auto-increment wildcard values as well as timestamps. If you need the mouse cursor in your screenshots, turn it on – if not, turn it off. All these preferences can be saved to your profile(s).

All taken screenshots will be added to a session where you can quickly access them for further editing.

Advanced functionality: editing screenshots

Shutter not only lets you take screenshots, it also offers basic image editing capabilties. These cannot replace full-featured graphic applications like GIMP, but offer a toolbox with very useful functions that help to emphasize the point you are trying to convey with your screenshot:

• Annotations: put your comments in your screenshot
• graphic symbols: choose from a plenitude of symbols to add to your screenshots (e.g. arrows, exclamation marks) – or import your own
• graphic primitives: draw lines, rectangles or ellipses to highlight certain parts of your screenshot
• Censorship: blur sensitive information in your screenshot to render it illegible

An example:

These functions will suffice in most cases – but should you require more advanced image processing, you can always launch the desired application (e.g.  GIMP) from within Shutter.

The bonus: more functionality through plugins

Shutter is extensible through a plugin architecture and already comes with some plugins that you can apply to your screenshots. Depending on your needs you might use them more or less often, but they are definitely nice to have. At the moment there are > 10 plugins available, providing PDF export functionality, stylish frames and nice effects.

The result of the Polaroid plugin:

For the potential and advantages of a plugin-based application desgin one only has to look at the Firefox Webbrowser and the activity it has sparked in the developer community.  It will be interesting to see what other Shutter plugins will appear in the future – the developers welcome creative ideas.

Install Shutter

Shutter packages exist for most popular Linux distributions, and Ubuntu users can even add the project’s Launchpad repository to their sources and receive updates. Links to the packages, as well as to Shutter’s Launchpad site, can be found on the Shutter download page; in addition, there is a detailed guide on how to add the repository to your Ubuntu sources.

Happy documenting!

Article written by Gregor Geiermann of openinformation.org and licensed under BA-SA 3.0.