How to Install and Set Up wayscriber on Linux

Updated

wayscriber is a Wayland-native screen annotation tool written in Rust: one keybind puts a drawing layer over any application, and you annotate, present, zoom, capture, then hide it again. To get it running you need three things: a package for your distro, the daemon running, and a global shortcut bound to wayscriber --daemon-toggle. The configurator can handle the daemon and shortcut steps for you. Note the compositor requirement: Hyprland, Sway, River, Wayfire, Niri, COSMIC, and KDE Plasma are supported, while GNOME works "with limits."

Step 1: Install the package

Pick the source that matches your distribution:

Distro / setup Install source
Debian, Ubuntu Native repository
Fedora Native repository
Arch AUR
NixOS / Nix users Nix flake
Anything else One-off .deb or .rpm download

The project ships a single native Rust binary — no Electron, no webview — so there is no runtime stack to install alongside it.

Step 2: Run the daemon and bind one key

The overlay is driven by a background daemon, so it needs to be running before your shortcut will do anything.

  1. Start the daemon. As a user service:
    systemctl --user enable --now wayscriber.service
  2. Bind a global shortcut in your compositor to:
    wayscriber --daemon-toggle

If you'd rather not do these by hand, the configurator can perform both steps — starting the daemon and setting up the shortcut — for you.

Step 3: Draw over anything

Press your bound key and the overlay appears with the pen, shapes, text, boards, and zoom. Press F1 for searchable, clickable Help. Press Esc to hide the overlay again.

What you get once it's running

Everything below is included — no plugins, no accounts:

  • Drawing toolkit — pen, highlighter, eraser; lines, rectangles, ellipses, fillable polygons; arrows with auto-numbered labels, step markers, and blur; multiline text, sticky notes, and a screen eyedropper with magnified pixel loupe. Undo and redo cover all of them.
  • Command palette — fuzzy search over actions with icons and category headers; reopen a recent item, save a preset slot, or edit a shortcut in place. Open with Ctrl+K or Ctrl+Shift+P.
  • Radial menu at the cursor — a fixed eight-way compass with tool glyphs, recent colors, and an outer size ring. Hold middle-click, move to a tool, release.
  • Boards and pages — transparent overlay, whiteboard, blackboard, blueprint, or corkboard backgrounds, each with separate pages and auto-contrast pens. Ctrl+Shift+1..9 jumps to a slot; Space+drag pans a solid board.

Common snags

  • Shortcut does nothing — the daemon isn't running. Check the user service before rebinding anything.
  • Overlay never appears on GNOME — GNOME support is explicitly limited; the compositors listed above are the reliable targets.
  • Latency or tearing — the default cap is 120 FPS with vsync off, and 144/240+ is configurable. The project reports 8–9 ms p95/p99 input-to-commit at 120 FPS on local hardware.
  • Rebinding — roughly 130 actions are rebindable through a single TOML file, so you don't have to live with the defaults.