Get screenshotting working through a hotkey. I need to screenshot an area of the screen, put the screenshot in a folder, and immediately open it.

In i3 had

bindsym Mod3+s --release exec scrot -s -e 'mv $f ~/s/screenshots && eog ~/s/screenshots/$f'

Nothing I tried worked (didn’t do anything weird):

Key([mod], "s", lazy.spawn(CONFIG_LOCATION + "screenshot.sh"))

Tracked it down to two main issues:

1. scrot works, scrot -s doesn’t. (Running the shell script directly from shell was fine!)
2. qtile doesn’t like variables in shell scripts

   # this works
   scrot -u -e 'thunar $f' "/tmp/shot.png"
   # this doesn't
   scrot -u -e 'thunar $f' "$SCREENSHOT_PATH/shot.png"
   

Decided to leave the first one alone, scrot -u gets the currently selected window, which generally is good enough for me.

The second one - first rewrote the script to get passed the target path as positional variable (surprisingly it worked!), then decided to do it python-only. As a bonus, copies the screenshot url to the clipboard.

# definition
copy_command = 'bash -c "echo {0} | xclip -selection c"'
# ...
def take_screenshot():
	SCREENSHOT_FILENAME = datetime.now().strftime("qtile_%y%m%d-%H%M%S%z")+"-$w$h.png"
	screenshot_path = D.SCREENSHOT_DIR +"/"+ SCREENSHOT_FILENAME
	command = f"scrot -u -e 'thunar $f && {Commands.copy_command.format('$f')}' {screenshot_path}"
	return command

#usage
Key([mod], "s", lazy.spawn(Commands.take_screenshot()))

(qtile-dotfiles/config.py at master · justinesmithies/qtile-dotfiles has escrotum as python module, errored out during install in the qtile venv and segfaulted on first run when installed outside of it.)