ShareY

Small command-line utility to easily take screenshots, upload them to a hoster and copy the URL to the clipboard.

The name is a nod to ShareX, a great utility which I used when still running Windows. Since switching to Linux I dearly missed similar functionality, having become so comfortable with my workflow in ShareX (Hit Alt+X -> Screenshot a region of the screen -> Upload to imgur -> Copy URL to clipboard -> Notify user), that using it quickly became second nature to share or note information visually.

Of course this utility only supports a very small part of ShareX's features, however they are the features I used and enjoyed most.

Installation

I made PKGBUILDs for Arch Linux here. You'll have to manually install python-imgurpython-git (use --asdeps) and then sharey. As noted in the readme, feel free to adopt any of these packages and upload them to the AUR. I don't really want to maintain them.

Usage

usage: sharey [-h] [--include-cursor] [--include-window-decorations]
              [--convert-bigger-than SIZE] [--jpeg-quality QUALITY]
              [--config PATH] [--uploader {imgur.com}]
              [--clipboard-backend {osx,gtk,qt,xclip,xsel,klipper,windows}]
              [{FullScreen,CurrentScreen,RectangularRegion,ActiveWindow,WindowUnderCursor}]

positional arguments:
  {FullScreen,CurrentScreen,RectangularRegion,ActiveWindow,WindowUnderCursor}

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --include-cursor
  --include-window-decorations
  --convert-bigger-than SIZE
                        Size in KiB
  --jpeg-quality QUALITY
                        1-100%
  --config PATH
  --uploader {imgur.com}
  --clipboard-backend {osx,gtk,qt,xclip,xsel,klipper,windows}

Currently you have to manually create a file in ~/.config/sharey.ini with the following contents to upload screenshots to imgur.

[imgur.com]
client_id = <your imgur client ID>
client_secret = <your imgur client secret>

You can get the client id and secret by registering an application with imgur, just choose "Anonymous usage without user authorization", use "http://127.0.0.1/" for the authorization callback URL and fill in the rest of the information. This step should actually be done by the script itself, however I haven't found a good way to do so easily in Python without firing up a SimpleHTTPRequestHandler and adding much extra code specifically dealing with the OAuth2 mechanics (maybe someone can recommend something?).

If using the clipboard-backend fails, (run sharey from the command-line to check) try choosing a different one with --clipboard-backend; xclip and xsel seem to be the most reliable for me.

Personally I defined two custom shortcuts in KDE:

• sharey --include-cursor --convert-bigger-than 768 triggered on Alt+X
• sharey ActiveWindow --include-cursor --include-window-decorations --convert-bigger-than 768 triggered on Alt+C

This allows me to quickly take screenshots of a region on the screen or an entire window, including its decoration by the window manager. When the resulting PNG screenshot exceeds 768 kilobytes, it is automatically converted to JPEG and uploaded instead.

Dependencies

• Python 3
• Spectacle
• pydbus
• Pillow
• imgurpython
• xsel
• pyperclip

The script is written in Python 3, Spectacle is used as the primary (and currently only) backend for taking screenshots, pydbus to communicate with Spectacle via D-Bus to take screenshots, Pillow to optionally convert screenshots to JPEG after exceeding a certain size as PNG, imgurpython to upload the image via imgur's API and xsel as a reliable clipboard backend for pyperclip to copy the URL to the clipboard in a (hopefully) desktop-environment-agnostic fashion.