A common use-case I have is to screenshot a handful of things for reference. I don’t want to save them to disk, since they’re very temporary. This can, for example, be while playing a puzzle game and having to cross-reference two things.
The way I’ve sort of landed on this is by using “Capture Rectangular Region”, then selecting “Accept”, which opens the viewing window. This is great, but the window closes if I ever try to take another screenshot. I’d like an option to manage this by myself. Either by setting a max amount of open windows, or by just letting me choose to only have them close if I close them manually.
It might have something to do with the fact that I can’t get spectacle working the way I want (opening the view window on pressing “Accept”, instead of just saving the image to disk immediately) without binding “spectacle -r” to the print screen key. Perhaps running the command each time affects how the window management is done?
i’ve only ever known spectacle to have one window open at a time, and in fact if i use my patented Spectacl(E) service menu to annotate an image while i have a screen cap in progress, then the screen cap window closes to show me the picture i wanted to annotate.
so i think you are just going to have to bite the bullet and save something to disk if you want to keep it around for reference.
my default save is to my desktop so i have easy access to it and so i can keep on top of junk i don’t need to save more permanently.
Someone who knows the code can probably correct me if I’m wrong, but from using it it does feel like the code does something like this somewhere:
if (viewWindowIsOpen) {
closeViewWindow();
}
and I’m asking that to turn into
if (viewWindowIsOpen and settings.closeViewWindowOnOpen) {
closeViewWindow();
}
Granted, it’s probably way more complex than that, but you get the idea.
The entire reason the “Accept” button is still around seems to be because of a similar scenario to what I describe*. If we assume that we want the accept button around for this use case, it feels like having the option to keep multiple view windows open at the same time is a natural second step.
- Apparently I can’t add links to posts, so I’ll have to do it like this:
https://invent.kde.org/plasma/spectacle/-/merge_requests/431#note_1129273