What Is wayscriber and What Can It Do?

Updated

wayscriber is a free, open-source, MIT-licensed live screen annotation tool for Linux, written in Rust. One keybind places a drawing layer over whatever is on screen, so you can annotate, present, zoom, and capture, then hide the layer again. It is a good fit if you run a Wayland compositor such as Hyprland, Sway, River, Wayfire, Niri, COSMIC, or KDE Plasma, or GNOME with limits, and you want ZoomIt-style markup without leaving your desktop. It is not a general-purpose drawing app: the overlay is temporary and meant for live use over other applications.

How it works

The model is deliberately small. A daemon runs in the background, a global shortcut toggles the overlay, and everything happens on top of the current screen.

  1. Install the package. Native repositories exist for Debian, Ubuntu, and Fedora, plus the AUR for Arch, a Nix flake, and one-off .deb and .rpm downloads.
  2. Bind one key. Run the daemon, then bind wayscriber --daemon-toggle to a global shortcut. The configurator can handle both steps for you, or you can enable the user service directly:
    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.

What you can do with it

All features are included. There are no plugins and no accounts.

Drawing toolkit

  • Pen, highlighter, and eraser
  • Lines, rectangles, ellipses, and fillable polygons
  • Arrows with auto-numbered labels, step markers, and blur
  • Multiline text, sticky notes, and a screen eyedropper with a magnified pixel loupe
  • Undo and redo across all of the above

Command palette

A 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 it 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, then release.

Boards and pages

Backgrounds include a transparent overlay, whiteboard, blackboard, blueprint, and corkboard. Each board keeps separate pages with auto-contrast pens. Ctrl+Shift+1..9 jumps to a slot, and Space+drag pans a solid board.

Performance and configuration

The tool ships as a single native Rust binary, with no Electron and no webview. On the project's own hardware measurements it reports 8–9 ms p95/p99 input-to-commit at 120 FPS, with 120 FPS as the default cap and vsync off; 144/240+ is configurable. Around 130 actions are rebindable through a single TOML file.

Is it right for you?

If you want to… wayscriber fits if…
Annotate live during a talk or demo You are on a supported Wayland compositor and can bind a global shortcut
Draw over any app without switching windows You want a temporary overlay rather than persistent documents
Avoid accounts, plugins, or telemetry You are fine configuring behavior through a TOML file
Use GNOME You accept that support is limited

The main constraints to check before adopting it are your compositor (GNOME is explicitly limited) and your willingness to set up a daemon plus a global keybind. If those are fine, the install-to-drawing path is three steps, and the overlay is available from any application.