kImageAnnotator VS ksnip

Previously Spectacle used the kImageAnnotator library for the annotation function, so when that library got cropping support Spectacle got it too. For better or worse the new UI no longer uses that library, so I'm guessing the Spectacle devs will have to add in cropping support manually now. No clue if there are plans for it unfortunately, but I assume if work gets started on it there will be an update on that bug report.

It's available as a library (https://github.com/ksnip/kImageAnnotator), additionally you can use the --edit-existing flag with Spectacle to edit arbitrary existing images.

Yeah, it's really good. You can thank the author of https://github.com/ksnip/kImageAnnotator/!

That's just the last change that made it to 0.6.0, the actual difference is more like this.

Cropping in Spectacle will only appear when kImageAnnotator 0.6.0 gets released, as noted in the bug report.

I actually just learned about Ksnip, because I first wanted to recommend you KDE Spectacle, but I noticed it didn't show a crop tool. I discovered Spectacle uses Ksnip's kImageAnnotator for editing and thus discovered Ksnip. Somehow Ksnip does show a crop button and other features that are not enabled in Spectacle. I think I like Spectacle more for quickly taking a screenshot, while Ksnip seems nice to have for a quick edit.

can also be used in non-KDE X11 desktop environments.

which doesn't really explicitly say much, and in fact the only tool I could find that claimed to be able to support everything was ksnip, which seems to work fine with wlroots but beyond that https://github.com/ksnip/ksnip#known-issues outlines the situation well enough; KDE is at least only temporarily broken, but GNOME isn't going to improve because GNOME did that on purpose. Now, that readme says you can use xdg-desktop-portal, but I have a GNOME+Wayland machine on hand, and I couldn't get it to actually work. I think what's supposed to happen is that every time I do a screenshot it prompts for permission, which I wanted to verify so I could complain that that was totally unreasonable, but what actually happens is that it just fails, which is... not better. Oh, and while searching for solutions to that I found flameshot, but that just refuses to even run. So... maybe someday the portal solution will work; in the meantime, I feel comfortable describing the situation as Wayland not having a uniform working way of taking screenshots.

[0] In particular, so we can avoid the situation from X11 where a load of drawing primitives are baked in that nobody has any use for anymore.

Ksnip is a simple and efficient cross-platform screenshot tool with all the essential annotation features. Whatsek raves, "Try ksnip! Went from greenshot to share, way too many features, found ksnip. Tabs... Awesome!"

Otherwise, the simplest solution is probably to either stick to the older Spectacle versions or use another screenshot tool like Flameshot or ksnip.

ksnip - screenshot tool with annotation features. https://github.com/ksnip/ksnip

ksnip is a cross-platform screenshot and annotation tool

Ksnip https://github.com/ksnip/ksnip

Hey, I've been using [ksnip](https://github.com/ksnip/ksnip) which works really well on both my Rocky Linux 8.7 laptop and my Ubuntu 22.04 LTS workstation. It's Qt based, so it depends on your love or hate for that, but it works VERY well.