Quick tips: screenshot screen region to clipboard under X

Snip snip

I’ve been making thumbnails for CK3 videos again (see featured image), and one of the things i put in there are the other characters. Unless there is a way to export them, I need to snip them from parts of the video for further manipulation.

Something like:

Import to File

I have a command, aliased to imp, which lets me import screen regions to jpgs files. In my .bash_aliases:

imp() {
    if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then echo "usage: imp filename (no need for jpg)"; return 1; fi
    import -quality 95% /home/robert/downloads/$1.jpg
}

this uses imagemagick’s import function to quickly give me images, if I want to screenshot a region to file. I use it frequently.

Import to Clipboard

I want to do a similar thing- drag a rectangle around the region, but send it to the clipboard so I can paste it into GIMP. Thankfully, bri-an came through on the i3wm subreddit:

import png:- | xclip -selection clipboard -t image/png

works exactly as intended!