The PMSS (Poor Man's Screenshooter) is a command-line utility that makes capturing screenshots a piece of cake. It is a small, freeware, easy to use shell script which hardly consumes any system resources. It uses well know Linux command-line utility, Scrot, on the backend. In order to understand the effectiveness of PMSS, let's first understand how Scrot works. Scrot is an open-source tool that is already included in the repositories of all popular Linux Package Managers, however, taking screenshots using this tool requires you to specify multiple command line parameters. Scrot is a great tool but it is not very user friendly. The creators of PMSS have used the functionality of Scrot along-with a new but extremely easy to use command-line interface. PMSS also requires another command line tool called xdotool (A utility to stimulate keyboard inputs or mouse movements). You can do alot of stuff with PMSS, you can:
- Capture the screenshot of your system's entire screen.
- Screenshot the particular window in focus.
- Capture the screenshot of the specific area of the screen selected via mouse.
- Easily upload your captured screenshots to imgur.
- Get the image upload links in various formats.
- Review the logs of the upload operations performed by this utility.
- Easily empty your screenshot directory by using a single keystroke.
In this article, we will discuss its installation and usage process on modern day Linux operating systems, Ubuntu 16 and CentOS 7, please be advised that same set of instructions will work for any older versions of these Linux flavors, too. Ready ? Great, let's get started on setting it up on Linux system.
How to Install PMSS on Ubuntu and CentOS
Installing Dependencies
As already mentioned in the introductory paragraph of this article, it runs on the basis of following two components.
- xdotool
- Scrot
If you try to run PMSS script without installing Scrot , you are expected to see following error message on your terminal.
Run following command to install it on Ubuntu system.
sudo apt-get install scrot
Following YUM command will install this dependency on CentOS system.
sudo yum install scrot
"xdotool" can be installed using following commands on Ubuntu and CentOS system respectively.
sudo apt-get install xdotool sudo yum install xdotool
If you try to run PMSS without installing xdotool, you are supposed to run into following error message on your system's terminal window.
Setting up PMSS
Alright, all required dependencies have been installed now, lets go ahead with setup of PMSS. On your Linux system's terminal, run following command to download the zipped contents for this tool.
sudo wget https://github.com/hakerdefo/pmss/archive/master.zip
It should take hardly a minute to download, once download process is complete, extract the downloaded file using following command.
sudo unzip master.zip
Now go into the extracted directory.
pmss
How Use PMSS
As soon as you run "pmss" command on the terminal, it will immediately display the following menu. All the tasks it can perform for you are listed here, right on the main menu.
Enter "E" To Take The Screenshot Of The Entire Screen Enter "W" To Take The Screenshot Of Window In Focus Enter "A" To Take The Screenshot Of Area Selected By Mouse Enter "D" To Empty Screenshots Directory Enter "L" To Manage Upload Log Enter "Q" To Exit
Let's demonstrate an example; press E on your screen and it will immediately capture the screenshot of your system's entire desktop screen. But interestingly, before performing the screen capture, it will present you with two modes ( as shown in the following screenshot); Clean Mode and Dirty Mode. Clean mode saves screenshots in a better format and with detailed logging.
Screenshot has been captured successfully, it will prompt you to choose whether you want to upload this screenshot to imgur.
Choose "Y" and it will upload the file and provide you with Download Link, HTML, Mark down and URL to delete this image from imgur. You can use these URLs in your blogs, github, forums, websites etc.
Conclusion
In this article, we have reviewed the features of PMSS (Poor Man's Screenshooter), its setup and usage process on Ubuntu and CentOS operating systems. It is a useful utility for both desktop and command-line users of Linux operating systems. It works flawlessly on all popular Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, Fedora, RHEL etc. Try it today, you will enjoy the simplicity and power of open source.
