Have the flameshot desktop entry launch the screenshot GUI

[anushTikoo]

So I'm on Fedora KDE Plasma, and when I installed Flameshot, I noticed that it doesn't actually take a screenshot when launched from the application launcher. Instead, it starts as a daemon in the background and shows up in the system tray. I checked the help command to figure out how to actually take a screenshot and found out that we need to run flameshot gui. Even when setting a keyboard shortcut for taking a screenshot, I have to select a command and type flameshot gui instead of directly choosing the application in the shortcut settings.

I read the docs and FAQ and realized that this is intentional, but I was wondering, from a user experience perspective, if the desktop entry in the application launcher could start flameshot gui instead of just starting the background daemon and showing up in the system tray. This would also mean that when setting a shortcut for taking a screenshot, I could directly select the application instead of having to choose a command and type flameshot gui.

From a user experience perspective, a new user would have to use the -h flag or read the documentation to figure out how to actually take a screenshot. It would be simpler if they could just launch Flameshot from the application launcher and take a screenshot directly without having to figure out the command first.

I know I could configure the desktop entry myself to run flameshot gui, but it would be great if this worked out of the box. If there's a reason why it currently works the way it does, I'd be interested to understand that.

[mmahmoudian]

Thanks for your comment. This behavior is by-design and will never change. There are many reasons this is the correct choice, but the main one is that calling daemon that is already running is much faster than starting a software from scratch (parsing config file, handling desktop integration, etc.)

That said, you don't need to define the settings in KDE Plasma. We have done that for you already and the file is already on GitHub:

https://github.com/flameshot-org/flameshot/tree/master/docs/shortcuts-config

You also don't need to exclusively rely on --help , we have a website that many things are already well explained:

https://flameshot.org

Another thing to point out that you might find useful is that 99% of time one would use the PrintScreen key on the keyboard to launch Flameshot (which typically should work out of the box). Conventionally, none of the screenshot tools are starting a screenshot when they are called from the launcher. PrintScreen is designed for that though.

Please let me know if you need help setting up the Plasma settings using the file I linked above, or if you would like to manually set it in the settings.

[anushTikoo]

Makes sense, it's faster to call an already running daemon. I personally don't like having things I'm not using running in the background and don't mind the slight delay in opening the tool, but I can understand why you've kept this by design.

Thanks for the file! I had checked out the website too, that's how I found out that this was intentional by design. I think software should be easy to use and a user shouldn't even have to check out the docs or go to the GitHub page unless they really wanna play around with the software or learn more about it. After installation, a user should be able to just use the software and figure things out. That's how easy to use it should be. But the current design is, of course, not a deal breaker. It didn't take me much time to figure out that it was actually running in the background.
PrtScr didn't actually work for me out of the box. Also, I didn't know that screenshot tools conventionally don't start a screenshot when called from the launcher, cz I used spectacle before this and it would start a screenshot from the launcher.

Thanks for the explanation and quick reply!

[mmahmoudian]

I personally don't like having things I'm not using running in the background

Me too. That's why I have flameshot --gui mapped to my PrintScreen key (and spectacle --gui --region to Shift+PrintScreen as backup)

cz I used spectacle before this and it would start a screenshot from the launcher.

After reading your comment, I doubted myself and tried it. It opens the Spectacle launcher, but does not take a screenshot.

This is unless you have something among your .desktop files that runs something like spectacle --gui --region. You can also try running spectacle in terminal and see how it behaves.

Thanks for the explanation and quick reply!

Thank you for expressing your opinion and put efforts in the betterment of this software. If you have any further ideas, feel free to open a discussion or issue.