one-button screenshots attempt with scrot and fvwm

 In Gnome desktop, a full-screen screenshot is printscreen, and to snap the current window, it's alt-printscreen.  Gnome desktop has many annoyances, so I tend to use to use fvwm.

So far, I've managed to get screenshots working under fvwm using a program called scrot(1), a shell script wrapping it, and a little fvwm config.

scrot is packaged by debian, so installing it is no problem.

The invocation to capture the currently focussed window with window manager decorations (borders) is, for example:

scrot -u $HOME/scr/%Y-%m-%d.%H.%M.%S.png -b

but the directory must already exist, so I wrap it in a shell script I put in ~/bin/screenshot with contents:

#!/bin/sh
set -e
 
DIR=$HOME/scr
 
if ! [ -d "$DIR" ] ; then
    mkdir $DIR
fi
 
exec scrot -u $HOME/scr/%Y-%m-%d.%H.%M.%S.png -b     

To bind this to alt-printscreen in fvwm, I have this config in .fvwm/config:

Key Print A M Exec exec screenshot  

The Print means the printscreen key.  The A means any context, which in fvwm means it happens anywhere, not just for example in the title bar or something.  The M stands for Meta, meaning Alt.

I wanted just printscreen alone to do it.  But replacing the M with N, for none, didn't work.  printscreen did nothing.  So the best I can do for now is alt-printscreen.

There seems to be a delay of around 2s.  I could try --delay 0, but it seems unlikely that zero wouldn't be the default delay anyway (the manpage scrot(1) does not say what the default delay is).

It also seems to cause a little window wibble, which is unsatisfactory.  A quick flash would be better.