Mate, use gnome-screenshot instead of mate-screenshot

Solution 1:

I resolved the same issue by adding the --interactive option

gnome-screenshot --interactive

Solution 2:

Actually, mate-screenshot does have the utility you want, (see man mate-screenshot) so there's no need to install an extra package. In a terminal, you can use the -a flag

mate-screenshot -a

This turns the pointer into a cross-hair and you can click and drag to select the area you want to grab.

You can set a custom shortcut for it (for example shift+prt sc like gnome-screenshot) in:

System > Preferences > Hardware > Keyboard Shortcuts

click the + Add button to add a custom one.

You may well find that using the command mate-screenshot -a in the keyboard shortcut does not work, in which case you need to modify the command to call bash and set DISPLAY... First check the variable in a terminal:

echo $DISPLAY

and take note of the output. For me it's :0.0

Then use this command in the shortcut setting:

bash -c "DISPLAY=:0.0 mate-screenshot -a"

Replacing :0.0 to match the output from echo $DISPLAY

Solution 3:

As @Zanna sais, mate-screenshot does have the availability of doing area screenshots.

But there is a well known bug (https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-utils/issues/37) which makes the command with this option fail.

As mentioned in the comments, the solution is to slighly delay the command:

#!/bin/bash
sleep 1
exec /usr/bin/mate-screenshot $@

within eg. /usr/local/bin/mate-screenshot and use it instead.

It changed my life, I keep using this feature now!