Flameshot: A cool tool to make screenshots under Linux

Posted on May 5, 2021 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 2 min read

Writing technical blogs often requires to do screenshot, where you may also want to highlight stuff of even obsfucate sensitive data.

I am a Gnome user and I am pretty happy with it, but I am not a big fan of gnome-screenshot. It offers only very basic functionality

  • Prt Scrn to take a screenshot of the desktop.
  • Alt + Prt Scrn to take a screenshot of a window.
  • Shift+ Prt Scrn to take a screenshot of an area you select.

But it lacks of features which other screenshot utilities like Shutter. I used it quite a long time before, but unfortunately Shutter does not work with Wayland and as I use wayland compositor I need an alternative. A very nice tool is flameshot which works with [wayland] and even allows in-app screenshot manipulation

This is very useful, cause you don’t have to store the image and open it with an editor, but can to all necessary activities directly on screen.

If you want to use the make it your default screenshot app, overriding the default keybinding you can do this as documented here. So once I press PrintScrn I get this view

flameshot ready for selection
after pressing PrintScrn flameshot( is ready to select the area you are interested

Now I am ready to select the area I am interested. Once I’ve selected it, there is a toolbar shown which gives me the possibility to draw, highlight or pixelate if needed:

flameshot selection
after selecting an area you can directly manipulate your image right on screen