qtchooser / qdbusviewer (ksnapshot / spectacle)

[Xen]

On my system (16.04) there is:

qtchooser: /usr/bin/qdbusviewer
qttools5-dev-tools: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/qt5/bin/qdbusviewer

qdbusviewer will try to start

qt4-dev-tools: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/qt4/bin/qdbusviewer

but is not installed.

installing requires 146 MB additional diskspace.

/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/qt5/bin/qdbusviewer works fine when directly 
invoked, but from KDE it also doesn't work as it probably starts 
/usr/bin/qdbusviewer

I was trying to discover how to replace Spectacle with KSnapshot as I 
consider the latter a vastly superior program at least in terms of user 
experience.

I realize though you can just use command line options for KSnapshot 
just fine.

Spectacle just has a badly designed UI. "Export to" doesn't make sense, 
whereas "Send to" does. "Save and exit" with 4 options doesn't make 
sense, just "Save" does. "Copy to clipboard" doesn't make sense, whereas 
just "Copy" does. The only thing annoying about KSnapshot is that it 
maximizes often upon start, and it remembers previous names you have 
saved under, giving you confusing filenames upon saving. In this case 
KSnapshot iterates and increases the number of the file.

The suffix. It's not very useful unless you explicitly set that as an 
option, not as the last filename you saved under. Spectacle will 
directly save to disk upon fullscreen mode activation (shift-print) with 
a useful predictable name that doesn't make sense but also doesn't 
confuse.

I guess many users would prefer the way of making a screenshot without 
starting the visible application that Spectacle has, which is something 
KSnapshot strangely doesn't offer. Personally I have also chosen to 
stick to that - there is no need for a 3rd flag for KSnapshot for me.

-------------------------
Spectacle also has weird stuff like the making a screenshot of the 
window under the cursor with no delay and without a mouseclick (you have 
to be really fast people) and that this is the default; and that you can 
make a screenshot of the active window from the UI by clicking on some 
other window after you have activated it (and not the active window 
itself) or that "active window" makes sense from the UI at all; why not 
just click on it then? Active window is an operation for tool-less 
activation, meaning based on a shortcut. It has no place in a UI that is 
itself the active window when you use it. (It will take the previously 
active window by default, but in that case you could have clicked on it 
or used a keyboard shortcut; there is not really a reason to have active 
window as an option here.

It will also not work for popup menus, whereas KSnaphost will. It will 
leave you with either the main application window (active window mode) 
or a blank screenshot (window under cursor mode).

It can also not even snapshot the KDE menu correctly, leaving you with a 
transparent image instead of what the user sees (my KDE menu is not 
transparent). I am amazed at how much bad stuff I can find for this 
program, even though I am trying :p.

Last but not least the "take new screenshot" button is just not in a 
comfortable position and the window is too big (and you cannot resize 
it) for comfortable use since usually you'd be interested in the windows 
behind it, right.

I mean it seems they did everything just about right to make it 
dysfunctional. That is also a skill.

Why people have chosen this thing instead of improving on the old? I 
don't know. I guess only the name is better (Spectacle). KSnapshot 
definitely had (and has) limitations but they would be easy to fix and 
apparently no one is doing it. Its visible dialogue layout is also not 
that outstanding but it could be improved you know. It's just the 
spatial layout of the bottom section though, the rest is perfect. I 
seriously have no need for anything other than KSnapshot in addition to 
saving in the background, and getting rid of those weird names (previous 
save names) and also.

Being able to create snapshots of a window without transparent border. 
That's probably a KWin feature, I find it hard to know how to get the 
DBus thing working for a single Window on purpose / call. You can't 
actually create shadow-less "square" (or rectangular) screenshots of 
windows without any extra fluff, but that do contain the window title. 
You'd have to turn all kinds of desktop effects off for that every time. 
It was worse under the blue glow of KDE 4 I think, because the extra 
space you got was even bigger (much bigger). It's pretty workable now.

Anyway those were my opinions for a long time about KSnapshot but now 
with Spectacle everything has got worse (apart from the background mode) 
(and the name Lol) and I am happy to find that it takes no more than 
perhaps 3 hours of working and subsequently writing to a mailing list, 
to set it back to KSnapshot.

Regards, B.

But PS PS

I just fixed it for now by symlinking the qt5 qdbusviewer to the qt4 
one:

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/qt5/bin/qdbusviewer 
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/qt4/bin



Regards.