A Variety Of Screenshot Tools
As I learned recently on Mastodon, there are multiple candidates for
screenshot programs for GNU/Linux systems. Until now, I was pretty
happy with GNOMEs built-in gnome-screenshot tool, but I decided to
take a look at the other contestants and see what the differences are.
So all of the tree tools have a git repository, so we can clone and
take a closer look at each of them. Currently I am not really
interested in functionality, but only in complexity of the codes base.
So let's take cloc as our judge. Be sure to exclude the translation
files as they are not part of the code base:
Gnome-screenshot
dzu@krikkit:/opt/src/git/gnome-screenshot (master)$ cloc . --exclude-lang="PO File"
152 text files.
141 unique files.
114 files ignored.
github.com/AlDanial/cloc v 1.98 T=0.06 s (653.0 files/s, 76435.1 lines/s)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language files blank comment code
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
C 12 561 385 2421
Glade 2 0 2 382
SVG 5 0 0 362
Meson 5 29 3 173
C/C++ Header 11 82 213 136
JSON 1 0 0 57
XML 2 0 0 55
Bourne Shell 1 8 0 15
YAML 1 2 0 13
Markdown 1 3 0 8
Text 1 0 0 6
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM: 42 685 603 3628
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
dzu@krikkit:/opt/src/git/gnome-screenshot (master)$
Shutter
dzu@krikkit:/opt/src/git/shutter (master)$ cloc . --exclude-lang="PO File"
365 text files.
329 unique files.
285 files ignored.
github.com/AlDanial/cloc v 1.98 T=0.45 s (312.2 files/s, 124630.1 lines/s)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language files blank comment code
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SVG 74 192 69 23687
Perl 49 6692 5064 19438
Bourne Again Shell 7 55 173 190
Markdown 5 55 0 132
XML 1 0 0 40
make 1 3 0 37
YAML 2 6 1 34
Bourne Shell 1 5 0 22
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM: 140 7008 5307 43580
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
dzu@krikkit:/opt/src/git/shutter (master)$
Swappy
dzu@krikkit:/opt/src/git/swappy (master)$ cloc . --exclude-lang="PO File"
58 text files.
49 unique files.
20 files ignored.
github.com/AlDanial/cloc v 1.98 T=0.06 s (706.2 files/s, 77214.6 lines/s)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language files blank comment code
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
C 11 426 27 2103
Glade 1 0 1 819
Markdown 2 115 0 267
C/C++ Header 11 67 4 265
JSON 5 0 0 219
SVG 1 0 0 118
Meson 3 19 5 108
YAML 5 6 1 89
Bourne Again Shell 1 22 5 77
CSS 1 6 0 23
JavaScript 1 3 0 8
XML 1 0 0 7
Text 1 0 0 1
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM: 44 664 43 4104
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
dzu@krikkit:/opt/src/git/swappy (master)$
Summary
Source code
| App | Lang | LOC |
|---|---|---|
| gnome-screenshot | C | 3628 |
| swappy | C | 4104 |
| shutter | Perl | 43580 |
Translations
| App | Lang | LOC |
|---|---|---|
| gnome-screenshot | C | 18297 |
| swappy | C | 166 |
| shutter | Perl | 109808 |
Assessment
Different tools can be totally different "points" in the "implementations space". If you do have limited time and try to understand which of some candidates is the most interesting from an engineering point of view, then looking at the source code is invaluable.
Being able to rate first hand the complexity of the software and the size of the community (translations) makes it easy to arrive at an initial assessment.
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