Reduce number of clicks required

Taking a screenshot should be pretty straightforward, and to my taste, Screenshoter is a little to cumbersome, to the point that i have preferred using Flameshot until now. To explain the essential difference in execution ease, here below is a comparison between the same process in the two softwares :

Flameshot

1. the app opens on a dimmed screen, and your mouse is immediately able to select the screen area you want to capture. press and drag the cursor along the screen to select the area.
2. when you release the mouse button to confirm, buttons immediately pop up around the area and prompt you whether you want to save as a file, copy to clipboard etc... a single click is required to confirm the desired action. So once the app is open, you only need two clicks to make a screenshot.

Screenshoter requires twice the clicks, sometimes more - granted, it's still only 4 clicks for repeated similar use cases, but when you do that often it gets a bit cumbersome :

1. the app opens and presents you with options you need to activate/deactivate or select. possible multiple clicks here, none if everything is set up, but checking everything still takes time, and the information is not presented so clearly.
2. click on Accept to confirm your choices
3. Screenshot is either taken right away, or you need to select a window/area you want to capture.
4. Another window opens and presents you with options you need to activate/deactivate or select. possible multiple clicks here, again.
5. click on Accept to confirm your choices

The process could be streamlined so as to be easier on the user and blend more seamlessly into their desktop experience.

One caveat i can see here is that my own use case is that i always only make screenshots of specific areas of my screen, for privacy reasons and to save on screenshot size for later uploading. But isn't these things we want to push forward and entice users into embracing ? This may be a topic for later discussions.

• Anyway, to avoid having to prompt the user if they want such or such capture type everytime they open up the app, an option to always use on by default without asking the user (in my case, region select) would be welcomed, and would accelerate the process for users like me.
• It's unnecessary to require a two-step process for confirmation, with first selecting what you want, and then clicking on Accept: transform each option into its own button, which blends selection and confirmation into a single click. Here is Qpdf doing it for example:

I hope you find this feedback worthy of your attention !

Screenshooter offers some flexibility, simply configure the keyboard shortcuts to suit your needs. For example, pressing PrintScreen triggers xfce4-screenshooter -r which bypasses the region selection and immediately enters the rectangle mode. One more possibility is to assign xfce4-screenshooter -r -c to Ctrl + PrintScreen so the screenshot is directly saved to your clipboard.

Does this approach address your problem?

I have preferred using Flameshot until now.

Honest question (no sarcasm implied): If you're happy with Flameshot, why migrate to Screenshooter?

Honest question (no sarcasm implied): If you're happy with Flameshot, why migrate to Screenshooter?

You should have asked it the other way ;) "Why did you move away from Screenshoter and chose Flameshot as your default screenshot app ?" When i installed Linux Mint i was pretty content with Screenshoter, as it was functional and did what it was told to. I wasn't so much bothered by the excessive clicking because i didn't use the tool as much... but as i my workflow changed and my habits made me use my computer a lot more than i anticipated, i started to notice these clicks more and more. As i knew about Flameshot before hand and had already used it, i figured "well why not" and switched to that app, which was instantly more direct to my taste. But recently it started behaving very badly (crashes that close the user session with the only option to restart my computer with my any unsaved work thrown out the window) so while waiting for a fix i figured i'd get back to using Screenshoter.

So the problem i'm raising here is something that made me move away in the first place, but since this is an opensource app i figured i might as well expose the situation the best i can and try to change Screenshoter's behavior for everyone's benefit !

[...] Does this approach address your problem?

Yes thanks ! using xfce4-screenshooter -r already makes it a lot better for me. But, this solution isn't very user-friendly, is it ? If you hadn't told me, i wouldn't have had any idea that this was even possible. I'm a bit of a nerd yeah, but i'm no developer, i don't code, i don't open up a terminal everyday to type in commands and it's already quite a feat i knew where to put that command you gave me ! You shouldn't expect most everyday users to know why and how to do that either... If Screenshoter already provides options and shortcuts via commands, i believe you should include a way for the user to access (most of) these through the UI, so that users who only ever interact with an app's UI still get to access the full potential of this app :)

Thanks for the insight, I just wanted to be sure you weren't trying to shoehorn Flameshot's UX into Screenshooter.

Yeah, it's not really obvious, I'll give you that, IIRC some distributions provide keyboard shortcuts more or less like I suggested. There is also the documentation mentioning this is possible. And I probably shouldn't compare oranges to apples (pun intended), but macOS has weird shortcuts to take screenshots (e.g. Cmd+Shift+4), most users just accept them.

Putting all of that aside, let's talk about potential improvements. Regarding the region selection dialog, maybe it's possible to replace radio buttons with regular buttons, I'm just staring at the dialog and can't decide where to put those buttons, on the bottom right they would create clutter, in the same place where the radio buttons are it'd be ok but at the same time weird IMO. Another thing to consider is that with radio buttons, which are selected based on the last usage, the user can see clearly what's the going to happen and just press enter (or navigate with the arrow keys), however, focus on regular is more subtle.

Do you have any concrete suggestion?

The three rectangles at the top would be buttons. Is this the dialog you're talking about ?

with radio buttons, which are selected based on the last usage, the user can see clearly what's the going to happen and just press enter (or navigate with the arrow keys), however, focus on regular is more subtle

I suppose this is for accessibility. Do you mean it would harder to automatically make the app focus on the last used button (one of the three rectangle sin my above example) instead of the ok button by default ?

I think big buttons only make sense with icons, and that gets us very close to gnome-screenshot's design.

I suppose this is for accessibility. Do you mean it would harder to automatically make the app focus on the last used button (one of the three rectangle sin my above example) instead of the ok button by default ?

No, no, it's just the dotted line inside the button that doesn't stand out so much, see for yourself:

---

All in all, I'm not against this proposal, it's just that icons (symbolic) require a bit of artistic touch, and I'm terrible at that. Unfortunately the standard icons don't offer appropriate icons for all 3 regions. I also would like to avoid pulling random icons from the web and dealing with attributions.

So, contributions (icons and/or a merge request) are welcome :)

I spent an hour this morning trying to get a grip on how icon sets work with xfce interfaces and i'm still lost i could not easily browse the Papirus, Greybird and adwaita icon sets that are pretty standard and appreciated. I wanted to understand if icons i would give you would be available for user theming but the technicity of it seems a bit out of grasp for the limited time i have, sorry !

In the meantime, here are 3 icons taken from popular symbolic icon websites that would fit well with the buttons, with permissive licences :

Icons from Iconoir

Entire Screen :

Active Window :

Select a region :

Icons from Google's Material Symbols Light Icon Theme

Entire Screen :

Active Window : or

Select a region :

Thanks for the references, I started to put a draft together but I probably won't have time this week and maybe the next to make an MR. With a bit of luck I might give an update before the end of April.