📸 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.