While spectacle is in crop mode (or “Rectangular Region” capture mode), and you left-click and release instantly without dragging, it makes a screenshot of the entire screen(s). I think it would be more intuitive to make a screenshot only of the window the user is hovering over, similar to the “Select Window” capture mode. There should also be a visual indicator when hovering over a window, its borders should be highlighted to visualize how big the screenshot will be.
This is a feature I’m sorely missing from ShareX back when I was on Windoze. It always displays window positions, and even the borders of their contents (for example, VLC’s viewport instead of the entire window) and captures only that on left click. I don’t know if such a thing is possible on Wayland due to tighter permissions and security, but if it is, that’d be an awesome feature to add to Spectacle.
you can configure spectacle to work in a variety of ways… the behavior you describe is not familiar tho
one configuration is to take a screen shot of the window under the cursor (regardless of which window has focus), which sounds like what you are after…
That is a feature we’ve been wanting to add, but haven’t been able to do it yet. I’d actually want to replace the current select window mode with that.
With that said, it sounds like you have “Accept on click and release” enabled. I actually hadn’t thought of the case where having that setting enabled and clicking without making a selection would cause the full workspace to be accepted, so it’s not deliberate behavior. Perhaps I should prevent this unless you double click just like when that setting is disabled.
Yeah, I do have “accept on click and release” enabled, to imitate ShareX’s behavior, since that’s what I’m used to. I didn’t know it worked differently when it’s off.
Good luck with the implementation of this feature! I read somewhere (on another screenshot tool’s github I think?) that it’s very tricky to do on Wayland, because it doesn’t report each window’s coordinates and size or something along those lines. Still, I hope you guys can pull it off
It could be done if it was implemented as a KWin effect, but the current rectangle UI is entirely implemented as a part of Spectacle. It would require a big change to the inner workings of Spectacle or a major duplication of code.
