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Enable selection and window capture on Wayland via interactive XDG portal#817

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luigimassa:feature/wayland-interactive-selection
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Enable selection and window capture on Wayland via interactive XDG portal#817
luigimassa wants to merge 2 commits into
shutter-project:masterfrom
luigimassa:feature/wayland-interactive-selection

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Summary

On Wayland, Shutter could only capture the full screen through the XDG desktop portal. The Selection, Window and Active Window modes were disabled because they rely on X11 (Wnck/GdkX11), which cannot enumerate or grab other windows under Wayland's security model (#187).

This PR routes those modes to the portal's interactive mode instead: the compositor (e.g. GNOME) shows its own native picker (area / window / screen) and returns an already-cropped image into Shutter's existing post-capture flow.

Changes

  • Wayland.pm: xdg_portal() takes an $interactive flag and adds the interactive boolean option to the Screenshot portal request (typed via Net::DBus::dbus_boolean). The full-screen request is byte-for-byte unchanged. A portal Response of 1 (user cancelled) now maps to error code 5 (aborted by user) instead of 9, so cancelling the picker shows no error dialog.
  • bin/shutter:
    • the Wayland guard now lets full/select/window/awindow through;
    • the capture dispatch routes select/window/awindow to xdg_portal($s, 1) on Wayland;
    • the Selection and Window buttons/menu items (toolbar and tray) are enabled on Wayland.

Out of scope (Wayland limitations)

  • Menu and tooltip capture stay disabled (not supported by the portal).
  • Window-by-name/regex (--window=PATTERN) and fixed-geometry selection (-s=X,Y,W,H): the portal accepts neither a target nor coordinates.
  • The workspace/window dropdown menus still require X11 to enumerate.

Testing

  • perl -c passes on both modified files.
  • Manually verified on a GNOME Wayland session: Selection and Window buttons open GNOME's native picker, the captured image lands in Shutter's normal flow, and cancelling the picker produces no error dialog.
  • Xorg and full-screen Wayland behaviour unchanged.

Refs #187

luigimassa and others added 2 commits May 21, 2026 10:49
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
…G portal

On Wayland, Shutter could only capture the full screen through the XDG
desktop portal; the Selection, Window and Active Window buttons were
disabled because they rely on X11 (Wnck/GdkX11), which cannot enumerate
or grab other windows under Wayland's security model (issue shutter-project#187).

This routes those modes to the portal's interactive mode instead, where
the compositor (e.g. GNOME) shows its own native picker (area/window/
screen) and returns an already-cropped image into Shutter's existing
post-capture flow.

Changes:
- Wayland.pm: xdg_portal() takes an $interactive flag and adds the
  `interactive` boolean option to the Screenshot portal request (typed
  via Net::DBus::dbus_boolean). The full-screen request is unchanged.
  A portal Response of 1 (user cancelled) now maps to error code 5
  (aborted by user) instead of 9, so cancelling the picker shows no
  error dialog.
- bin/shutter: the Wayland guard now lets full/select/window/awindow
  through; the capture dispatch routes select/window/awindow to
  xdg_portal($s, 1) on Wayland; the Selection and Window buttons/menu
  items (toolbar and tray) are enabled on Wayland. Menu and tooltip
  capture stay disabled (not supported by the portal); the workspace/
  window dropdown menus still require X11 to enumerate.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
@Photon89
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Hi, thanks for this PR! I tested it with Gnome and KDE and I think that we should go with non-interactive calls that are now available in the new xdg-desktop-portal prerelease (1.21.2 as of now): flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal#1981 The interactive call leads to various issues:

  1. The user gets another dialog where they need to again to choose a mode after having done so in Shutter.
  2. In KDE the interactive dialog doesn't offer a window selection, only the active window (which is the dialog's window itself at this time...).

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2 participants