I don’t often have envy of other people’s OS. However a friend of mine is using Skitch which allows him to take snapshots of his desktop easily and then annotate them of mark them up. That is much easier, than my efforts opening the file up in Gimp or OpenOffice , which I enjoy a lot. Sometimes however it’s nice to just be able to do things quickly.
I have something that is almost as good as Skitch: Shutter . It allows you take a bunch of snapshots and stores them in tabs, then you can easily crop or add text and pointers etc. It’s perfect for marking up a screenshot to draw attention to the important parts.
Once I had it installed, I needed to make it easy to use and found the compiz window manager as a plugin called Gnome Compatibility . Fire up CompizConfig Settings Manager ( /usr/bin/ccsm from the CLI) and enter Gnome in the search box at the top. Then click on it. At the top you see a tab labeled Commands .
There you will find options for Screenshot command line and Window screenshot command line . I set them to shutter –selection and shutter –window respectively and bound them to Print and
Now, when I take a snapshot, I can highlight the region I want, as well as adjust it. This is better than the Compiz built in snapshot. Then the image pops up in a tab in shutter and I can accumulate several snapshots that way and than mark them up easily.
Now, the only think I wish was nicer is adding text. You have to highlight the region and then double click it to open a dialog box. I’d love it if I could just type right in.
At any rate, it’s working pretty well.
\\@matthias