On-screen ruler for Ubuntu: screenruler
May 13th, 2010 | by Sean |
screenruler - two of them, one rotated to vertical
Just a quick note to say I’ve found one of those surprisingly useful features of a graphical desktop that really does make sense. I was thinking about calculating the positions of some elements on a web page and providing some relative or absolute positions to prevent ‘resizing salad’. The first thought that struck me was “what are the positions of the elements now?”. I stopped myself from taking a screenshot and measuring them with the GIMP’s image ruler, thinking that by now, some bright spark must have done the decent thing and provided something that would work on the desktop, for all applications.
The first ‘on screen ruler’ in a scan of search results that looked convincing was screenruler, and it really is exactly what I want. If you’re using Ubuntu, you should be able to install it using this magic ‘apt:’ link:
Install screenruler using an apt: link
If you’re a command-line kind of person, ‘sudo apt-get install screenruler’ will do much the same thing.
My favourite features of screenruler: the ‘track mouse’ tooltip so I don’t have to count the marks to get precise measurements, and the fine-positioning afforded by the arrow keys on the keyboard.
Enjoy!