BEST DESKTOP ACCESSORY Ksnip
Version: 1.9.0 Web: https://github.com/ksnip/ksnip
Adesktop accessory is usually a small application with a graphical UI that makes our daily Linux computing life easier. That’s perhaps the most popular category in the history of HotPicks. These tools are usually one-person projects and therefore not all of them survive in the long run.
We’ve selected one application that’s been actively maintained for several years and has grown from a tiny hobby project into a widely used Linux program. This is Ksnip (see LXF266), the screenshot taker for Linux. While pressing PrtScrn enables you to capture your screen, there’s only basic software behind this and you’ll be missing out on most of Ksnip’s extra features. Indeed, the program is much more than a tool for taking pictures of your screen. A better way to describe Ksnip is that it’s an advanced clone of the Snipping Tool from Windows. As such, it can capture specific parts of the screen while assisting you with a magnifying glass and a snipping cursor for pixel-perfect precision.
The main benefits of the program become apparent after the screen is taken and your picture is loaded into the Ksnip image editor. This contains an abundance of annotating tools that can achieve much more than a Paint-like image editor. For example, Ksnip enables you to paint auto-numbered circular tags that save a lot of time. The only other software for Linux that can do this is Shutter, which has long been unmaintained and has only started to recover recently. The Ksnip image editor can also blur selected regions to help you protect personal or sensitive data, and also makes it possible to draw arrows, rectangles, add text captions and more. Most of the tools enable you to change various options, such as colour and size.
Ksnip has overtaken Microsoft’s original Snipping Tool and is now a cross-platform program available for Windows as well. In the Linux world it remains its most advanced and feature-packed screen grabbing tool.