๐ธ screenshot: Better macOS screenshots via the Terminal
screenshot
is a command line utility that lets you specify an application name and window title in order to take a screenshot of a specific window.
Using screenshot
, you can capture windows belonging to an application, or only an application's windows with certain titles.
Justification and Use Case
The macOS screencapture
utility is not developer friendly.
To programmatically take a screenshot of an application, or a specific window, you must supply a window ID to screencapture
.
In order to find a window's window ID, you'll need call out to Quartz.
In newer versions of macOS, the screencapture
utility improves the user experience slightly: you can run the command and then click on the window you'd like to capture.
However, that necessitates that the user clicks a window each time. You cannot include this as part of an automated pipeline.
To that end, I use this utility to automatically generate screenshots of web, mobile and desktop applications.
Example
Take a screenshot of the current Terminal window and view it with Preview.app:
open "`screenshot Terminal`"
Take a screenshot of the Pycharm application with the window title containing "screenshot":
screenshot Pycharm -t screenshot
Installation
You will need Python 3.6+. Please install it with brew
or ports
if you do not have it already.
PyPI
pip3 install screenshot
Github Source
Grab the source, run the following in the source dir:
pip3 install -r requirements.txt
then run
python3 setup.py install
Usage
screenshot --help
Usage: screenshot [OPTIONS] APPLICATION_NAME
Options:
-w, --window_selection_options TEXT
Options: all_windows, on_screen_only,
above_window, below_window, include_window,
exclude_desktop
Default: exclude_desktop
on_screen_only
-t, --title TEXT Title of window from APPLICATION_NAME to
capture.
-f, --filename TEXT Filename to save the captured PNG as.
-a, --all_windows Capture all windows matching parameters.
-o, --output TEXT Image format to create, default is png
(other options include pdf, jpg, tiff)
-s, --shadow Capture the shadow of the window.
--help Show this message and exit.
License
See LICENSE
. Message me if you'd like to use this project with a different license.