Bug 509706

Summary:	Cannot capture Plasma panel tooltips (pop-ups, hover effects, etc.)
Product:	[Applications] Spectacle	Reporter:	John Veness <john.kde>
Component:	General	Assignee:	Noah Davis <noahadvs>
Status:	RESOLVED WORKSFORME
Severity:	normal	CC:	kde, nate
Priority:	NOR
Version First Reported In:	6.4.5
Target Milestone:	---
Platform:	openSUSE
OS:	Linux
Latest Commit:		Version Fixed/Implemented In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description John Veness 2025-09-20 11:08:03 UTC

SUMMARY
Spectacle doesn't seem to be able to capture tooltip-like popups that show when hovering over items in Plasma panels. For example, the text "Application Launcher, Launcher to start applications" when hovering over the launcher icon, window previews when hovering over taskbat icons, or text like "Battery at X%, h:mm remaining" etc. when hovering over the battery icon.

STEPS TO REPRODUCE
1. Run Spectacle
2. Configure to have a delay before taking a screenshot, e.g. 5 seconds
3. Initiate a fullscreen or rectangular selection screenshot
4. Before the countdown finishes, hover the mouse over one of the elements mentioned above, e.g. the Launcher icon
5. Observe that the text "Application Launcher, Launcher to start applications" does appear on screen
6. Wait for the countdown to finish

OBSERVED RESULT
The text "Application Launcher, Launcher to start applications" disappears before the screenshot is taken. The text does not appear in the screenshot.

EXPECTED RESULT
The text "Application Launcher, Launcher to start applications" stays on the screen and appears in the screenshot.

SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS
Operating System: openSUSE Tumbleweed 20250918
KDE Plasma Version: 6.4.5
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.18.0
Qt Version: 6.9.2
Kernel Version: 6.16.7-1-default (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: X11

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Happens in Wayland as well.

Other tooltip-like popups *are* able to be captured, such as when hovering over a window titlebar button, or when hovering over buttons in KDE apps.

Comment 1 Nate Graham 2025-09-23 17:07:21 UTC

You can screenshot them by making them appear and pressing PrintScreen on its own, or else Meta+Shift+Printscreen with no timer or a 0.3s timer.

The  works for me 100% on Wayland, at least. Can't test X11 since I don't have any machines loaded up with an X11 session anymore.

In other words, don't use the timer functionality to try to make it take a screenshot automatically in the future, while trying to make the popup visible before the timer fires.

Comment 2 John Veness 2025-09-23 18:34:46 UTC

OK, thanks, that works as a workaround, although I still feel it's a bug that the timer method makes the popups disappear before taking the screenshot.

I think it's something to do with the way the timer makes a window appear then disappear in the task bar - that action seems to make the popups disappear. For example I can recreate this if I bring up a popup while waiting for a slow app to start up - the popup will disappear when the app appears in the task bar. So maybe this is a bug somewhere else in Plasma rather than in Spectacle in particular.