Omareel

Omareel is a native screen recorder and editor for Omarchy and Hyprland. It captures the screen without the system cursor, records pointer and keyboard activity separately, and then renders a smooth synthetic cursor, click effects, rounded framing, backgrounds, and automatic cursor-following zooms. Finished projects export to MP4 or GIF.

Screenshot placeholder — editor screenshot coming soon.

Features

• Region, window, or focused-monitor recording through gpu-screen-recorder at 60 fps by default.
• Optional desktop and microphone audio in a single compatible audio track.
• Non-destructive clip trimming, splitting, speed changes, and timeline zoom editing.
• Rubber-band multi-selection for zoom blocks, with grouped movement and deletion.
• Omarchy wallpaper and live accent-color integration.
• Synthetic cursor smoothing, click rings, idle hiding, and cursor-following auto zooms.
• Aspect presets, padding, rounded corners, inset borders, and configurable shadows.
• Camera rotation, horizontal flip, independent shadow/border styling, and 720p/1080p capture.
• Hardware-accelerated MP4 export with CPU fallback, plus GIF export.
• Self-contained .omareel project bundles that preserve the source and editor state.

Install

On Omarchy, install from the Omarchy package repository:

omarchy-pkg-add omareel

Prebuilt x86_64 and aarch64 packages are also attached to every GitHub release; install one with sudo pacman -U omareel-<version>-<arch>.pkg.tar.zst.

To build from a checkout on Arch Linux:

cd pkg
makepkg -si

On Omarchy, ./install-omarchy first adds any missing runtime/build packages with omarchy-pkg-add (falling back to pacman) and then installs the same PKGBUILD.

gifsicle is optional and can be installed for additional GIF optimization.

Omareel keeps its recording bar and camera self-view out of the captured video with a small Hyprland plugin that ships in the package and is loaded on demand. The plugin is built for the exact Hyprland commit of the package repository; after a Hyprland upgrade it waits for a rebuilt omareel package, and until then the overlays move off the recorded screen instead. See docs/USAGE.md.

Usage

Run omareel to open the launcher, or bind the smart recording toggle:

o.bind("SUPER + ALT + R", "Record with omareel", "omareel record")

The launcher's app id is omareel. To keep its compact 380×460 window floating and centred, add this optional Omarchy window rule:

o.window("^omareel$", { float = true, center = true, size = "380 460" })

The default command uses one gesture: drag to select an area, click a window to snap to it, or click the desktop to record the whole screen. Explicit modes remain available for dedicated keybinds. For focused-monitor capture:

o.bind("SUPER + ALT + R", "Record with omareel", "omareel record --fullscreen")

The same command stops an active recording, finalizes its bundle, and opens it in the editor. Useful commands include:

omareel record --region --with-desktop-audio
omareel edit ~/Videos/omareel/Recording.omareel
omareel export Recording.omareel -o recording.mp4
omareel probe Recording.omareel
omareel help

Existing installations can keep using the legacy omarecord command alias. On first run, settings are copied from ~/.config/omarecord/settings.json when the new settings file does not exist, and existing .omarecord bundles remain editable in place.

Stopping a recording

While recording, use any of these stop paths:

• Click Stop on the recording bar.
• Click the REC indicator in the Omarchy bar.
• Run omareel record or omareel record --stop again. This is especially useful for a keybind.
• Run omareel record --cancel to stop and permanently discard the recording bundle.

The recording bar appears at the top center of the recorded monitor. Turning on the webcam in the launcher opens a floating camera self-view right away; drag it where you want it and it stays there through the recording, using the same warm camera. Native capture keeps both the bar and the self-view out of the file, wherever they sit. Pass --no-selfview to suppress only the camera bubble. Pass --no-bar or set OMAREEL_NO_BAR=1 before starting if you do not want the bar to appear.

Editor shortcuts

Key	Action
Space	Play or pause
Left / Right	Step one frame
Shift+Left / Shift+Right	Seek one second
S	Split the selected clip at the playhead
Z	Add a zoom at the playhead
Delete	Delete the selected zoom, or selected clip
Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Shift+Z	Undo / redo
Ctrl+S	Save now
Ctrl+E	Open export

Bundle format

An .omareel bundle is a directory. screen.mp4 is the cursor-free source recording; screen.mp4.ts anchors input timestamps to the first video frame; capture.json describes the region, scale, dimensions, frame rate, and audio; input.jsonl stores pointer, button, scroll, and key events; project.json contains non-destructive editor choices; and thumb.jpg is the launcher thumbnail. Moving the whole directory preserves the editable project.

Troubleshooting

Pointer clicks and keys require membership in the input group. Check the current login with:

id -nG | grep input

If the group was added recently, log out and back in. Recording continues without click/key data when input devices cannot be opened.

If gpu-screen-recorder fails, first try Omarchy's own screen recorder to confirm the GPU and capture backend work, then check that the selected monitor/region is valid. Run the toggle with debug logging enabled to append GSR stderr to /tmp/omareel.log:

OMAREEL_DEBUG=1 omareel record --region

Set the variable on the start invocation so the detached recorder inherits it. For the full CLI and UI debug screenshot flags, see docs/USAGE.md.

Development

./bin/build
./bin/test

Tagged releases (v*) build and test on x86_64 and aarch64 and attach Arch packages and plain tarballs to the GitHub release through .github/workflows/release.yml.

The frozen engineering contract is in docs/SPEC.md.

Credits

Interface icons are from Lucide, used under the ISC license. See LICENSES/lucide.txt.