title: MWSnap: A scalpel for screenshots link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/mwsnap-a-scalpel-for-screenshots/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 403 created: 2009/01/12 16:45:36 created_gmt: 2009/01/12 16:45:36 comment_status: open post_name: mwsnap-a-scalpel-for-screenshots status: publish post_type: post

MWSnap: A scalpel for screenshots

Should have done this post a long time ago, but was just reminded today of how absolutely awesome this tool is.

MWSnap is a screenshot utility for Windows that is, well, one of the few reasons I ever need to run Windows.

While your basic ALT-PRTSC on both Windows and Linux will get you 2/3 of where you need to be most of the time, grabbing the image of the current window in focus, there are times when you need to be a little more discriminating. This comes up all the time when trying to grab images from a VNC session. Because VNC is itself in a window on your desktop, any windows inside it (like an xterm on the remote desktop), can’t be isolated with ALT-PRTSC.

Now in the case of a VNC session, you could take a shot of the whole window and then use an image editor like GIMP, or Windows Paint, to cut out what you want. But there’s a better way.

MWSnap lets you select any rectangular area on your screen and copy it to the Clipboard. To do this I select “Any rect. area” and then press “Snap any area”. A hairline cursor shaped like a cross appears that you can stretch over the rectangle you want to grab. After that its just a matter of either doing an Edit… Copy to copy it to the Clipboard or a File … Save to save it to disk as a graphics file.

I’ve found this little tool without peer when capturing images for documentation. My only regret is that its not available for Linux, although it might work under Wine… Oh, look at that!

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