Screenshot with Vim

In this post I will show you the easiest way I could come up with for taking screenshots and inserting them to a markdown file while taking notes using Neo(vim).

The title maybe confusing as I couldn’t come up with a shorter title myself. If you could come up with a shorter title please contact me.

I faced this problem while I was taking notes through my playing of CTFs and doing pentests.

I always run a command and forget to take a screenshot and put it into my notes, or just hate the hassle of taking a screenshots, creating a folder called Pictures for organization, move the screenshot to the Pictures folder and write the Markdown syntax to include the Pictures in my note.

Needed Packages

To face this problem we are going to need the following packages:

• scrot,
• neo(vim)
• xclip

To install scrot, xclip, and neovim on arch based system all you need to do is.

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sudo pacman -S scrot neovim xclip

On other systems you may have to google how to install it using your own package manager. And if you’re using Windows think about your life choices for a bit.

Scrot

Scrot is a minimalist screenshot taking utility, and has many features, but we are going to use the --select option in our case, because it’s rare that anyone would like to take a fullscreen screenshot.

To take a fullscreen shot though all you need to do is invoke the scrot and a screenshot will be taken and stored in the home directory.

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scrot

To save the screenshot to a specific directory, supply the path to after the command scrot.

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scrot <path>

And to take a section of your screen all you have to is supply the --select option to the scrot command. Your pointer will change and you can select the area you want to take screenshot of.

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scrot --select <path>

Neo(vim)

Vim is a text editor and if you’re reading this you probably know what vim is, if you don’t it’s fantastic text editor that uses key-bindings. You should really try learning vim.

xclip

xclip is a command line app that can be used to interact the system clipboard. We will use to transfer the name of the screenshot we are taking from our custom script to vim. xclip can use three clipboard we will be using the primary which is the default.

Taking a screenshot in Vim

The script

First I wrote a shell script that takes a screenshot, makes a directory called Pictures, puts the name of the screenshot to the clipboard, and save the screenshot to the directory. Not in that particular order though. Here is the script. Write this to a file and put where you want, I have it in scripts directory.

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#!/bin/sh

pwd=$(pwd)
pic_name="screenshot_$(date "+%h_%d_%I:%M:%S_%p").png"

mkdir -p "$pwd/Pictures"
scrot --select "$pwd/Pictures/$pic_name"

echo -n "./Pictures/$pic_name" | xclip

And make it executable.

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chmod +x script.sh

Vim config

Put the following in your vim configuration. This maps CTRL-s to call the screenshoting script and inserts a markdown syntax for images in the current line.

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nnoremap <C-s> :!$HOME/.local/scripts/screenshot.sh<CR><CR>i![](<ESC>"*pA)<Home><Right><Right>

And that’s it your done. Now ever time you want to insert a screenshot you just have to hit CTRL-s and insert the image name. Here is a demo of me trying to record a video using ffmpeg and capture it’s output.