Taking screenshots with shotgun and slop

I have been having problems with scrot and its -c option for selecting a part of the screen. It glitched most of the time and rendered selection borders in the screenshot itself. I have decided to switch to something new – shotgun.

There were basically two options, shotgun and maim, though shotgun seemed as a lighter and more simple alternative. It does not support many features which need to be substituted by other programs – the unix way of doing things.

Several programs are needed: obviously shotgun, slop, tee and xclip.

shotgun $(slop -f '-i %i -g %g') - | tee /home/$USER/scrot/$(date +'%F_%T').png | xclip -t 'image/png' -selection c

This is my final command and works as follows. First thing that runs is slop -f '-i %i -g %g', which returns the selection position and size. This gets passed to shotgun and is passed to tee. The file gets saved to my screenshot folder with the filename containing date and time generated by date +'%F_%T'. The binary data is also passed to xclip and copied to clipboard for quick pasting.