Mate screenshot area works in terminal, but not in hotkey

Question

When I type mate-screenshot -a into my terminal, I'm given crosshairs and everything is dandy. However, my declared keyboard shortcut with command mate-screenshot -a just takes a screenshot of the whole desktop. What's going on here?

Answer 1

This can also be done as a one-liner in the keyboard shortcuts, in case anyone else still has this problem:

bash -c "sleep 0.1; mate-screenshot -a"

is working well for me

Answer 2

There appears to be a race condition with the interaction between the MATE shortcut system and mate-screenshot. You can work-around the bug by creating a wrapper /usr/local/bin/mate-screenshot-wrapper similar to this:

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

Then assign your custom shortcut to /usr/local/bin/mate-screenshot-wrapper -a. On my system I can get away with reducing the sleep 1 to sleep 0.1.

Hat tip: https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-utils/issues/37#issuecomment-155736099