Can't edit keyboard shortcuts (Solved..?)

[JoeInMN]

Hello,

Running Mint 13 Maya on an Asus EEE netbook, which annoyingly does not have its model number anywhere on its case. Let me know which section of the hardinfo would be helpful and I will paste it here. I have enabled backport repositories and am running MATE 1.4 as far as I know.

I am trying to set up a new keyboard shortcut in the Control Center / Keyboard Shortcuts dialog, but I must be missing a step somewhere. Say I am trying to run the scrot screenshot utility with CTRL/PrtSc. I click Add, give it the name Scrot screenshot and the command scrot (with no options for the moment), and Apply, and then close the dialog; then I click the Disabled box on the new shortcut's entry and press CTRL/PrtSc, and close the dialog. Now when I press CTRL/PrtSc, a .png screenshot should silently generate in my home directory. This is what happens when I run scrot in a terminal, but the keyboard shortcut does nothing. In troubleshooting this I have tried running other things with other key combinations, and haven't been able to get anythingn else to work either. So I know that scrot itself works fine, but either the Keyboard Shortcuts setup is broken or (probably more likely) I'm not doing something I need to do.

I had no problem setting up CTRL/ALT/T to launch the terminal recently, but now I can't do anything (including disabling the terminal shortcut again). I hadn't tried making any shortcuts before that, and I don't remember whether that was before or after I backported the 1.4 stuff in, so I don't know whether the problem has something to do with the upgrade or was there from the start.

Thanks for any help anyone can give me.

[kyphi]

Someone must have peeled off the stickers on the base of your Eee PC. Remove the battery and there should be another sticker that will tell you the model.

Screenshots work on a "cut and paste" model. Use Ctrl + Print Screen and then open a text document or LibreOffice Writer and paste the screenshot and save it.

[JoeInMN]

Screenshots work on a "cut and paste" model. Use Ctrl + Print Screen and then open a text document or LibreOffice Writer and paste the screenshot and save it.

I haven't had to paste a screenshot from the clipboard since I abandoned Windows years ago. My difficulty is more with keyboard shortcuts in general than with screenshots specifically, but I'll go on a bit more about screenshots, just because I like the scrot utility so much:

PrtSc by itself works for me as expected; what I assume is mate-screenshot's "Save Screenshot" dialog pops up to ask you for a filename for the screenshot and where to save it etc. The scrot utility (install via Synaptic) generates your screenshot automatically, based on the command options you give it, without showing a dialog. If you just call "scrot" with no options, it unobtrusively puts a full-screen .png with a date-, time- and size-stamped filename (e.g. "2013-12-14-193126_1024x600_scrot.png") into your home directory. I use a command string which sets up date, time, image type, and save-to parameneters:

Code: Select all

scrot '%y%m%d_%H%M%S.jpg' -e 'mv $f ~/Pictures/screenshots' -q 100

This generates a "131214_193126.jpg" file at maximum quality and stores it in my specified screenshots folder. If you set scrot to run with a keyboard shortcut, it does all this with a keypress. I was running KDE (my preferred desktop) until a week or so ago, when I decided MATE might run a bit more smoothly on this little computer (I think I was probably right). With KDE I had scrot assigned directly to the PrtSc key, and it worked brilliantly. You can hit your hotkey repeatedly and save a string of screenshots on the fly with no interruption from a dialog box. For me it's been one of the most useful accessories I've found, and trying to set it up on MATE was what led me to the general shortcuts issue.

[kyphi]

Thank you for explaining "scrot". I had not heard of it.
On my installation I always use "Screenshot" which is installed by default. I find it immensely useful since I can easily define the area to be captured and I can set the destination. It also provides a date and time stamp and no keystroke to activate it is necessary. It seems though that both programs accomplish similar things.
Since I use the Cinnamon desktop environment, I am unable to help you with KDE or MATE.

The Eee PC in use here is a 1000H model and running Linux Mint 15 XFCE. The screenshot program is installed by default.

[JoeInMN]

By way of bumping this, I will put it this way: Has anyone else here successfully created a custom keyboard shortcut of any kind in MATE, and if so, did they do anything differently than I did? It doesn't appear to be working at all for me.

Thanks!

[JoeInMN]

Ok... Update Manager bumped MATE up to 1.6 just a bit ago, and I now apparently am able to configure keyboard shortcuts. So I still don't know whether the issue was with me or 1.4, but at any rate it appears to have gone away.

[soerenB]

Hi,

I had the same problem on Mint17 XFCE, trying to use gnome-screenshot from the repos, as that has a file-naming option, too. I want to use it in "area" mode, but there should be no more interaction required than that mouse-dragging for selecting.

Now, the script that did only work by rightClick -> execute read:

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    #!/bin/sh
	gnome-screenshot --area --file=/path/to/shotsFolder/$(date +%y-%m-%d-%H:%M:%S).png

I couldn't run it by just double-clicking, either.

The remedy was a short timeout:

Code: Select all

    #!/bin/sh
	sleep 0.2
	gnome-screenshot --area --file=/path/to/shotsFolder/$(date +%y-%m-%d-%H:%M:%S).png

That was, apparently, the only change needed to do the trick. No problem binding it to a key.

Regards

soerenB