Environment Variable in Path Configuration

[Fovir-GitHub]

Flameshot Version

Flameshot v13.1.0

Installation Type

Linux, MacOS, or Windows Package manager (apt, pacman, eopkg, choco, brew, ...)

Operating System type and version

NixOS

Description

If I set the savePath option to $HOME/Pictures/Screenshots, the program say that the path does not exist.

I have tried to edit the source code, but I can not find where to expand the path.

Steps to reproduce

1. Write savePath=$HOME/Pictures into .config/flameshot.ini.
2. Run flameshot gui

Screenshots or screen recordings

No response

System Information

1. NixOS 25.11 (Xantusia) x86_64

[borgmanJeremy]

@mmahmoudian my $0,02 is this should stay outside of Flameshot.We would first need to parse the save path to detect in there is an environmental variable. Then we would need to expand that ourselves. This would need to work differently on windows vs unix.

[mmahmoudian]

@Fovir-GitHub This is duplicate of

• Consider resolving ~ or env vars in config values #3041
• Allow environment variable expansion in config #3442
• And partly discussed in Let launcher argument support path option #2314

@borgmanJeremy for my own curiosity I was searching to see if Qt has anything to offer. It seems there are two functions for this, i.e., qEnvironmentVariable and qgetenv, but I'm not sure if they both are working cross platform:

https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qtenvironmentvariables.html#qEnvironmentVariable

If Qt is expanding it for us, in a cross platform way, then it would reduce the maintenance load for us. I also don't think that env. vars can be used as an attack surface, but even if that's the case, it would be entirely users' responsibility for having such config on their system 🤷

The only case that I can imagine having an environmental variable is handy in the config is when the user wants to keep the same config across different machines with different username (e.g., home and work).