Collecting my attempts to improve at tech, art, and life

Cinnamon Screenshot Shortcuts

Tags: linux cinnamon tools

attachments/img/2017/cover-2017-01-01.png

I take many screenshots during my day, for work and for fun. I use the Cinnamon desktop environment in Linux Mint. I kept forgetting the keyboard shortcuts to do screenshots directly rather than opening up GNOME Screenshot.

Here are the default shortcuts. You can customize them in Keyboard Settings, as shown in the image that started this post.

Keyboard shortcuts for taking screenshots

Action Shortcut
Take a screenshot Print
Take a screenshot of a window Alt + Print
Take a screenshot of an area Shift + Print
Copy area to clipboard Shift + Control + Print
Copy screen to clipboard Control + Print
Copy window to clipboard Control + Alt + Print
Toggle recording desktop [Shift + Control + Alt + R

Print may have its own special label on your keyboard. On mine the Print key is labeled PrtSc.

Next, with pictures!

Take A Screenshot

The Print key alone will save your entire screen.

fullscreen screenshot
Fullscreen screenshot, scaled down

Take A Screenshot Of A Window

Alt + Print together to save a single window.

window screenshot
Window screenshot, scaled down

Take A Screenshot Of An Area

Shift + Print for an area screenshot. Your mouse point will change to a crosshair. Click and drag to select the area you want to save.

area screenshot
An area on the Linux Mint home page

Sometimes I had to hit this combo a few times to get it work. That could be a software bug somewhere or it could just be grit in my keyboard.

Record Desktop

WARNING

Okay I’ve never done this part before. I probably missed something important. Be warned if you try it yourself.

Control + Shift + Alt + R will start recording your desktop. The same combo will end the recording session. No sound is recorded. Recordings are saved as WebM files in your home directory. WebM support is widespread, although some browsers require codecs to be installed.

For more advanced screen recording functionality, RecordMyDesktop looks like a good bet.

Wanted to show you a video of the area screenshot functionality. The keyboard shortcut for that doesn’t seem to work when recording. Instead I made a video of using the screenshot application.

I tried several times before I noticed a little red light in the lower right corner when recording is active.

Since this is more to show about recording videos than anything else, I decided the full resolution video was not needed. I installed FFmpeg and used it to resize the video, following the FFmpeg resizing tutorial.

$ sudo apt-get install ffmpeg
$ ffmpeg -i ~/cinnamon-20161231-9.webm -vf scale=720:-1 \
  static/video/2017/cinnamon-desktop-recording.webm

Ta-da!

2024-01-15

Oh no, where did I put the video? Okay well uh use your imagination.

Well — “ta-da” assuming your browser supports WebM.