KDE Is Getting A New Screenshot Utility, But No Wayland Support Yet
KDE Applications 15.12 will be presenting a new screenshot utility that's completely rewritten and replacing the original KSnapshot.
The new screenshot tool is currently called KScreenGenie, but following its independent release on 15 August, it will be renamed to KSnapshot. The maintainer of this new tool, Boudhayan Gupta, wrote into Phoronix to share this news of the new screenshot KDE offering.
Gupta has written more about this new KSnapshot utility over on blogs.kde.org. He began by working to port KSnapshot to KDE Frameworks 5 until realizing a massive rework would be needed for it to support Wayland in addition to X11. As a result, he started on this completely new screenshot application. He's considering this "KSnapshot 2.0."
The new tool is making use of native APIs on each platform for taking screenshots rather than relying on Qt's built-in screenshooting APIs. XCB is used directly for the X11 back-end to take screenshots but sadly it doesn't have actual Wayland support yet.
For lack of a stable API for taking screenshots in Wayland, that image grabber doesn't work yet with Weston having its own API for this purpose and other compositors implementing their own API (or not) for the time being. Look for the new KSnapshot to appear in December within KDE Applications 15.12. The actual UI isn't too different from the current KSnapshot but there's code in the works for having built-in image editing/annotation support and other features.
The new screenshot tool is currently called KScreenGenie, but following its independent release on 15 August, it will be renamed to KSnapshot. The maintainer of this new tool, Boudhayan Gupta, wrote into Phoronix to share this news of the new screenshot KDE offering.
Gupta has written more about this new KSnapshot utility over on blogs.kde.org. He began by working to port KSnapshot to KDE Frameworks 5 until realizing a massive rework would be needed for it to support Wayland in addition to X11. As a result, he started on this completely new screenshot application. He's considering this "KSnapshot 2.0."
The new tool is making use of native APIs on each platform for taking screenshots rather than relying on Qt's built-in screenshooting APIs. XCB is used directly for the X11 back-end to take screenshots but sadly it doesn't have actual Wayland support yet.
For lack of a stable API for taking screenshots in Wayland, that image grabber doesn't work yet with Weston having its own API for this purpose and other compositors implementing their own API (or not) for the time being. Look for the new KSnapshot to appear in December within KDE Applications 15.12. The actual UI isn't too different from the current KSnapshot but there's code in the works for having built-in image editing/annotation support and other features.
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