Selectarea

Selectarea is a term used for a small interactive utility or feature that enables a user to define a rectangular region on the screen by dragging with the mouse. It is primarily encountered in Unix-like environments and is commonly employed in screen capture and image editing workflows.

In practice, a selectarea tool runs in a graphical session and lets the user click and drag to form a rectangle. When the selection is completed, the tool outputs the region’s geometry, typically in the form of coordinates and dimensions such as width, height, and the top-left x and y coordinates. The exact output format can vary between implementations, but a common representation is a string like WxH+X+Y.

Common use cases include producing precise selections for screenshots or for cropping and processing images. By emitting a geometry value, selectarea can be integrated with other command-line utilities, enabling workflows that automate capture, crop, or further image manipulation without manual re-entry of coordinates.

There is no single official implementation of selectarea. Various small scripts and packages provide similar functionality, particularly for X11 environments, and some are adapted for Wayland. Because of this, behavior, output formatting, and configuration options can differ between versions.

See also: screen capture, cropping, region of interest, image processing pipelines.