swappy

A Wayland native snapshot and editor tool, inspired by Snappy on macOS. Works great with grim, slurp and sway. Also works with other screenshot tools if you use the -f option. See below.

Wayland code was largely taken from grim and requires a compositor that implements the wlr-screencopy-unstable-v1 protocol.

You can use this tool in two ways, either use it as the output of grim (recommended) or grab the geometry yourself (wayland code is still WIP).

Screenshot

Example usage

Output of grim (or any tool outputing a PNG file):

grim -g "$(slurp)" - | swappy -f -

Swappshot a PNG file (good for compositors not supporting screencopy protocol):

swappy -f "~/Desktop/my-gnome-saved-file.png"

Swappshot a region:

swappy -g "100,100 200x200"

Select a region and swappshot it:

swappy -g "$(slurp)"

Print final surface to stdout (useful to pipe with other tools):

grim -g "$(slurp)" - | swappy -f - -o - | pngquant -

Grab a swappshot from a specific window under Sway, using swaymsg and jq:

grim -g "$(swaymsg -t get_tree | jq -r '.. | select(.pid? and .visible?) | .rect | "\(.x),\(.y) \(.width)x\(.height)"' | slurp)" - | swappy -f -

Config

The config file is located at $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/swappy/config or at $HOME/.config/swappy/config.

The file follows the GLib conf format. See the man page for details. There is example config file here.

The following lines can be used as swappy's default:

	[Default]
	save_dir=$HOME/Desktop
	line_size=5
	text_size=20
	text_font=sans-serif

• save_dir is where swappshots will be saved, can contain env variables and must exist in your filesystem
• line_size is the default line size (must be between 1 and 50)
• text_size is the default text size (must be between 10 and 50)
• text_font is the font used to render text, its format is pango friendly

Keyboard Shortcuts

• Ctrl+b: Toggle Paint Panel

---

• b: Switch to Brush
• t: Switch to Text
• r: Switch to Rectangle
• o: Switch to Ellipse
• a: Switch to Arrow

---

• R: Use Red Color
• G: Use Green Color
• B: Use Blue Color
• C: Use Custom Color
• Minus: Reduce Stroke Size
• Plus: Increase Stroke Size
• Equal: Reset Stroke Size
• k: Clear Paints (cannot be undone)

---

• Ctrl+z: Undo
• Ctrl+Shift+z or Ctrl+y: Redo
• Ctrl+s: Save to file (see man page)
• Ctrl+c: Copy to clipboard
• Escape or q or Ctrl+w: Quit swappy

Limitations

• Copy: If you don't have wl-clipboard installed, copy to clipboard won't work if you close swappy (the content of the clipboard is lost). This because GTK 3.24 has not implemented persistent storage on wayland backend yet. We need to do it on the Wayland level, or wait for GTK 4. For now, we use wl-copy if installed and revert to gtk clipboard if not found.

Installation

• Arch Linux

Building from source

Install dependencies (on Arch, name can vary for other distros):

• meson
• ninja
• wayland
• cairo
• pango
• gtk
• glib2
• scdoc

Optional dependencies:

• wayland-protocols (for the -g option to work with wlr-screencopy-unstable-v1 protocol)
• wl-clipboard (to make sure the copy is saved if you close swappy)
• libnotify (not get notified when swappshot is copied or saved)

Then run:

meson build
ninja -C build

Contributing

Pull requests are welcome.

License

MIT