ricture

A small screenshot tool for Wayland, written in Rust. Inspired by Spectacle and MarkShot.

No GTK/Qt — the overlay is a raw wlr-layer-shell surface rendered in software with tiny-skia, UI renders with Slint

Features

• Area and fullscreen screenshots
• Notification via rustbus
• Animation on startup
• Annotation tools:
• • Brush
• • Arrow
• • Line
• • Primitive shapes
• • Text
• • Blur

Building

This project depends on libxkbcommon at build time (via smithay-client-toolkit), which needs pkg-config to be found. A Nix flake is included with a dev shell that provides it:

nix develop
cargo build --release

Without Nix, just make sure pkg-config and libxkbcommon's dev headers are installed and cargo build --release should work directly.

Use --release — the overlay redraws itself continuously while open, and an unoptimized debug build is easily 30x slower per frame, which is very noticeable as input lag while dragging.

Runtime dependencies

Copying to clipboard shells out to the wl-copy binary from wl-clipboard — it must be installed and on $PATH at run time, separately from the build-time dependencies above. nix build .#default wraps the binary with it automatically; outside Nix, install wl-clipboard through your distro's package manager.

Running

cargo run --release

or (for instant fullscreen shot):

cargo run --release -- --fullscreen 

Drag a rectangle, hit Enter to save it to screenshot.png in the current directory, or Esc to cancel.

Keybinds

Key	Action
Ctrl + C / Enter / Space	Copy selected area to clipboard
Ctrl + S	Save selected to .png in ~/Pictures/Screenshots directory

Config

ricture uses a TOML config file located at ~/.config/ricture/config.toml (expample here):

[general]
save_path = "/home/user/Pictures/Screenshots"
enable_notifications = true

[appearance]
rect_color = "#ffffff" # '#rrggbbaa' is also valid

Layout

A Cargo workspace, one crate per concern:

• crates/capture (ricture-capture) — pure Wayland screen capture. No UI, no rendering; just talks to wlr-screencopy and hands back raw RGBA pixels.
• crates/overlay (ricture-overlay) — the interactive part: the layer-shell surface, input handling, and tiny-skia rendering. This is also where annotation tools will eventually live.
• crates/config (ricture-config) — TOML config parsing and validation.
• crates/export (ricture-export) — PNG saving and clipboard copying.
• crates/notify (ricture-notify) — desktop notifications.
• crates/ricture (ricture, the binary) — thin entry point that wires the other two together and does the final crop + save.

License

GPL-3.0 — see LICENSE.