What drawing tools and features does wayscriber offer?

wayscriber includes a full annotation toolkit in a single native Rust binary — no plugins, no accounts. The tools cover freehand drawing, shapes, text, boards, and zoom, and they're all reachable from one keybind that drops a drawing layer over any application. If you present, teach, or review work on Linux/Wayland and want to mark up the screen live, the toolset below is what you get.

The drawing toolkit

• Pen, highlighter, eraser — the core freehand tools.
• Shapes — lines, rectangles, ellipses, and fillable polygons.
• Arrows with auto-numbered labels — useful for pointing at steps in sequence.
• Step markers — numbered callouts for walkthroughs.
• Blur — hide sensitive regions on screen.
• Multiline text and sticky notes — annotate with typed content, not just ink.
• Screen eyedropper with a magnified pixel loupe — pick an exact color from anywhere on screen.
• Undo and redo — works across all of the above.

The page describes the ink as keeping up with your hand: 8–9 ms p95/p99 input-to-commit at 120 FPS, with 120 FPS as the default cap (vsync off, 144/240+ configurable). That matters for annotation because laggy strokes make handwriting and quick arrows unusable in a live setting.

Interaction: command palette and radial menu

Two mechanisms keep the ~130 rebindable actions out of your way:

• Command palette — fuzzy search over actions with icons and category headers. You can 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 the pointer to a tool, release.

The radial menu is the faster path during a live session because it appears where your cursor already is; the palette is better when you know the action name but not the binding.

Boards, pages, and backgrounds

Every board keeps separate pages with auto-contrast pens, so ink stays readable regardless of background.

Navigation details from the site: Ctrl+Shift+1..9 jumps to a slot, and Space+drag pans a solid board.

Setup and verification

1. Install the package — native repositories exist for Debian, Ubuntu, and Fedora, plus the AUR for Arch, a Nix flake, and one-off .deb/.rpm downloads.
2. Bind one key — run the daemon, then bind wayscriber --daemon-toggle to a global shortcut. The configurator can do both steps for you; the service command shown is systemctl --user enable --now wayscriber.service.
3. Draw over anything — press your key, and the overlay appears with pen, shapes, text, boards, and zoom. Press F1 for searchable, clickable Help, and Esc to hide the overlay.

To confirm it works for your use case, open a slide deck or a browser page, trigger the overlay, and test a stroke, an arrow with a numbered label, and a board switch. If strokes track your hand without visible lag and the radial menu opens on middle-click, the toolset is behaving as documented.

What to check before committing

• Compositor support — the site lists Hyprland, Sway, River, Wayfire, Niri, COSMIC, KDE Plasma, and GNOME with limits. If you're on GNOME, treat the annotation layer as partially supported rather than equivalent to the others.
• Configuration surface — roughly 130 rebindable actions live in one TOML file, so budget a little time if you want custom bindings instead of defaults.
• Licensing and cost — free and open source under MIT, with no plugins and no accounts mentioned.

If your workflow is live markup during presentations, teaching, or screen review on a supported Wayland compositor, the toolkit here covers the common cases — freehand, shapes, numbered arrows, text, boards, and zoom — without leaving the overlay.