Vellum

Vellum is a small native Wayland overlay for drawing directly over the live desktop.

demo.mp4

Vellum began as a fork of Chameleos by Thomas Lindae.

Compatibility

Vellum requires a Wayland compositor that implements wlr-layer-shell. This includes niri, Sway, Hyprland, river, Wayfire, labwc, KDE Plasma, and COSMIC, though niri is the only compositor currently tested.

Installation

NixOS

For released versions, use the NixOS module from nixpkgs.

For Vellum main, use the flake module:

{
  imports = [inputs.vellum.nixosModules.default];
  services.vellum = {
    enable = true;
    # Reduce driver memory use on NVIDIA. Disables software fallback.
    # graphicsDriver = "nvidia";
  };
}

From source

Install the dependencies for your distribution:

Arch dependencies

sudo pacman -S --needed base-devel git rust wayland libxkbcommon fontconfig mesa vulkan-icd-loader

Debian 13+ dependencies

sudo apt install build-essential git pkg-config rustup libwayland-dev libxkbcommon-dev libfontconfig-dev libgbm-dev libvulkan1
rustup default stable

Fedora dependencies

sudo dnf install cargo gcc git pkgconf-pkg-config wayland-devel libxkbcommon-devel fontconfig-devel mesa-libgbm-devel vulkan-loader

Build and install to ~/.local:

git clone https://github.com/greyxp1/vellum
cd vellum
cargo xtask install

Usage

Run vellum & and bind vellum toggle to a compositor shortcut. For example, in niri:

Mod+A { spawn "vellum" "toggle"; }

Running as a systemd user service

Save this as ~/.config/systemd/user/vellum.service:

[Unit]
Description=Vellum screen annotation overlay
After=graphical-session.target
PartOf=graphical-session.target

[Service]
Type=exec
ExecStart=%h/.local/bin/vellum
Restart=on-failure

[Install]
WantedBy=graphical-session.target

Enable the service:

systemctl --user enable --now vellum.service

Controls

Mouse, trackpad, and pen

Action	Mouse	Trackpad	Pen
Draw or manipulate the selection	Left drag	One-finger drag	Drag with the pen tip
Open the radial picker	Right-click	Two-finger click	Briefly press the barrel button while hovering
Choose a tool or color	Hold the right mouse button, move, then release	Open the picker, move, then one-finger click	Hold the barrel button while hovering, move, then release
Erase	Middle drag, or middle-click then left drag	Three-finger tap to toggle, then one-finger drag	Hold the barrel button while drawing or drag with the eraser tip
Change size	Mouse wheel	Two-finger scroll	Mouse wheel or trackpad scroll

Gestures and modifiers

Input	Action
Ctrl + click in selection mode	Add or remove an annotation from the selection
Double-click selected text	Edit it
Shift while drawing	Constrain the shape
Alt while drawing	Draw triangles, rectangles, and ellipses from their center
Ctrl + scroll	Change opacity
Shift + scroll	Change roundness
Drag a selection handle	Reshape the selection or stretch text
Shift + drag a text handle	Resize text without stretching

Configuration

Configure Vellum in ~/.config/vellum/config.toml. See the default configuration for options and shortcuts.