Tips/Take screenshots faster with Spectacle using shortcuts

Introduction

Sometimes we just need to snap a picture of something happening on our computers, but for some people, that’s not an easy task at all! People come up with the most ingenious ways of doing that, including but not limited to taking a picture of the screen with a camera, pressing a button and pasting the picture in a paint program, or even using a photocopier and placing their monitor on it!

(Okay, maybe that last one is a myth, but don’t doubt human creativity)

Thankfully, KDE Plasma offers a simple yet powerful screenshotting tool called Spectacle, and here we’ll learn how you can capture your screen using super convenient shortcuts. So, are you ready?

Note

While reading this tutorial, you might get confused when we mention the Meta key. In Plasma, the Meta Key is what you might know as the Super, Start, Windows, or Command key. If you have trouble finding it, it’s the key that sits between Ctrl and Alt on most keyboards.

Taking screenshots with Spectacle

Capture a specific window

If you want to take a screenshot of a specific window, there are two shortcuts you can use.

To capture the active window, just press Meta+PrintScreen.

If you want to capture the window under the cursor, press Meta+Ctrl+PrintScreen.

Doing any of those with Spectacle closed will automatically save your screen capture to your Pictures folder. With it open, it will update the picture in Spectacle’s window.

Screenshot with a rectangular selection

Pressing Meta+Shift+PrintScreen will bring up the rectangular selection. You can then click and drag to select a rectangular region of the screen and press Enter to take the screenshot. If you want to cancel, you can also press Esc.

The help tooltip also shows a lot more shortcuts you can use while in that mode!

Capture the entire desktop

Finally, if you want to capture everything on your screen, press Shift+PrintScreen.

This is the KDE Plasma Desktop. Isn’t it pretty?

Take screenshots without a keyboard

If you’re on a device without a keyboard, like a Steam Deck, you can still take screenshots without a keyboard. To take a screenshot, you can simply open Spectacle from the Application Launcher which is usually the icon at the bottom left corner of your screen. Spectacle will take a screenshot based on the last used settings.

After you capture your screen, you can either take a new screenshot with different settings by clicking on the Take a New Screenshot button or save the one you made by clicking on the Save As… button and selecting where you want to save it to:

Oh, look! A screenshot of Spectacle was taken by itself. How cool is that?

If you do happen to have a keyboard, you can press PrintScreen to open Spectacle as well.

See how fast you can capture your screen using keyboard shortcuts in KDE Plasma? That’s only the tip of the iceberg though. You can also customize the shortcuts, annotate over pictures, share, and even print.

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