[kde-community] Request to join KDE Incubator for KScreenGenie

[Boudhayan Gupta]

Hi all,

Over the past few weeks, I have been writing a new screenshot
application for KDE. I'm calling it KScreenGenie, and the code is
currently online at https://github.com/BaloneyGeek/KScreenGenie.

I initially started out by trying to help out in porting KSnapshot to
KF5, but it struck me that there was a lot of duplication in the code,
major changes in the design would be required to support Wayland, and
that there was support for a whole bunch of strange image grabbers,
including one which allows one to capture a single widget in the
application (which doesn't even work properly in KF5/Qt5). In all (at
least for me), it seemed easier to write something new from scratch
and copy over some of the code from KSnapshot.

So I've gone ahead and done this, and I'd like to request the KDE
community to weigh in and see if this can some day replace KSnapshot.

Some of the technical changes are listed below:

* QtQuick/QML based UI
* Native backend for image capture (doesn't use the Qt pixmap capture
APIs). Allows for greater control with multimonitor setups. Currently
only an X11 backend exists, written using only XCB and using KScreen
for monitor layout information. Writing a backend isn't difficult (one
of my goals was to make writing a Wayland backend very easy once an
API becomes available).
* More stuff in the README file in the repo (I know calling it a KDE
app and the eventual replacement for KSnapshot right now - on GitHub -
is a bit early and possibly pretentious, sorry, but since I wrote it
with the express purpose of replacing KSnapshot, I thought I'd save me
an extra step by not giving it a temp name / KAboutData code).

I've been active on the IRC channels while I was coding this (I'm
BaloneyGeek, hi!), and I'd like to thank Martin Graesslin who has been
a big help through the coding process, and has guided me on what to do
on more than one occasion. Having "officially" been part of the
community for only two months, I'd also like to thank Valorie
Zimmerman for showing me the way, so as to speak, by showing me how
things are done around here, and pointing me to the Incubator.

-- Boudhayan Gupta