Taking screenshots on Wayland

What’s different on Wayland

On X11, any app could read the whole screen and listen for any key. Wayland stops that: each app sees only its own windows. Two things follow for screenshot apps:

• Capturing goes through the desktop. The app asks, through the desktop’s screenshot portal, and the desktop hands back the picture.
• Global shortcuts are set in the desktop. Apps can’t grab Print Screen for themselves. Instead, you tell the desktop to run a command when you press a key.

Set up Glintshot’s shortcuts

On first run on Wayland, Glintshot shows the three commands to bind, with a Copy button for each. They look like this:

The commands on the first-run screen use the path where Glintshot is installed, such as your AppImage, so copy them from there.

GNOME

1. Open Settings › Keyboard › View and Customize Shortcuts.
2. Choose Custom Shortcuts › Add Shortcut, paste a command, then set the keys.
3. To use PrtSc, first clear it from GNOME’s own Screenshots shortcuts in the same list.

KDE Plasma

1. Open System Settings › Keyboard › Shortcuts.
2. Choose Add New › Command or Script, paste a command, then record the keys.

Delayed captures

Add --delay 5 to any command for a five-second countdown, handy for capturing a menu that closes when you press a key. The tray also has Capture after a delay.

Questions

Why does my desktop ask before an app takes a screenshot?

On Wayland, reading the screen goes through the desktop, which may ask you first. That’s the point of the design: apps can’t watch your screen without you knowing.

Which Glintshot features don’t work on Wayland yet?

Scrolling capture and Burst (they need a continuous stream of the screen), pasting into another app for you (the app is brought to the front and you press paste), and capturing every display at once (only the one under the pointer).

Am I on Wayland or X11?

Run echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE in a terminal. It prints wayland or x11.