lanner

Spotlight screen-region video recorder for wlroots Wayland compositors.

Draw a rectangle, record only that area to video. While you select, everything outside the rectangle is dimmed like a spotlight; once recording starts the dim lifts to a single bright border, so you can keep using the rest of your screen normally while the region records. The overlay never appears in the recording. Built and tested on Hyprland, designed for any wlroots-based compositor (Sway, river, Wayfire).

Demo

A short clip recorded with lanner itself will live here (tracked as the M8 demo).

Why

slurp plus wf-recorder can already record a region, but the dimmed selection disappears the instant you finish drawing it. lanner keeps a live spotlight on screen for the whole recording and wraps the full flow (select, record, stop, and later transcode) into a single tool.

Features

• Spotlight selection: every monitor dims at once with a live rubber-band rectangle and a true transparent hole; draw the region on whichever monitor you like and that one is recorded.
• Border-only recording: once recording starts the dim lifts to a single border, and pointer and keyboard pass through, so you can use the rest of your system (browse, switch workspaces, type into the recorded app) while it records.
• Stop the recording with the on-overlay Stop button or a global keybind that toggles it off; Esc cancels before recording starts.
• Records to a crash-safe MKV through wf-recorder, finalised cleanly with a SIGINT so the file is always playable.
• Never films its own UI: the dim, the border, and the control bar all sit outside the captured geometry.
• Pre-draw control bar: pick the audio source (None, System, Mic, or Mic+System), the output format (MP4, WebM, AV1, animated WebP, or GIF), and a countdown delay before you draw; on record the bar collapses to a Stop button.
• Captures system and/or microphone audio via the active pactl device (the default input is used, so selecting a different mic just works); Mic+System mixes both through a temporary PipeWire source that is torn down on stop.
• Optional countdown (Off, 3s, 5s, or 10s) shown as a number over the selection before recording starts, so the count is never in the file.
• A live REC dot and elapsed timer on the overlay while recording.
• Transcodes in the background (lanner quits at once) and fires a desktop notification plus copies the saved path to the clipboard when it finishes.

Requirements

• A wlroots-based Wayland compositor (Hyprland, Sway, river, Wayfire).
• wf-recorder for screen capture.
• ffmpeg for transcoding to the final format.
• System libraries gtk4 and gtk4-layer-shell.
• Optional: notify-send (libnotify) and wl-clipboard (wl-copy) for the on-finish notification and clipboard copy; recording works without them.

On Arch Linux:

sudo pacman -S wf-recorder ffmpeg gtk4 gtk4-layer-shell

Build

git clone https://github.com/tidynest/lanner.git
cd lanner
cargo build --release

The binary is at target/release/lanner.

Usage

Run it; a control bar appears at the top. Pick your audio source, output format, and optional countdown delay, drag a rectangle over the area you want, then press Enter. If a delay is set, a countdown shows over the selection first; then recording starts. While recording you can use your system normally; the region keeps capturing. Stop with the on-overlay Stop button, or by running lanner again (the second invocation toggles the recording off). Press Esc to cancel before recording starts.

lanner

Recordings are written to ~/Videos/lanner-<timestamp>.mkv, then transcoded to your chosen format (e.g. .webm) beside it. The MKV is kept as the crash-safe original. The transcode runs in the background, so lanner exits the moment you stop; the final file appears in ~/Videos a moment later.

Bind it to a key in Hyprland (~/.config/hypr/hyprland.conf) so one press starts and the next stops:

bind = SUPER_SHIFT, R, exec, /path/to/lanner

If the selection leaves too little room for the full control bar, the bar drops the REC timer and keeps just the Stop button, which needs far less space. At a selection that fills the screen entirely there is nowhere to put anything without filming it, so the bar hides and the keybind is the way to stop.

Limitations

Recording is at the display's native resolution; only the GIF format is deliberately downscaled, since a native-resolution GIF is enormous (GIF lacks modern video compression). Multi-monitor: every monitor dims and you can draw the region on any of them, including a secondary monitor at a non-zero origin or a scaled (HiDPI) monitor; the output you draw on is recorded. A region spanning two monitors and live monitor hotplug are not supported. Tracked in issue #9.

Roadmap

• M1: layer-shell spotlight overlay
• M2: rubber-band selection with a transparent hole
• M3: region recording to MKV via wf-recorder
• M4: stop methods (Stop button, keybind toggle), input passthrough, and border-only recording
• M5: transcode to MP4, WebM, GIF, animated WebP, AV1
• M6: pre-draw control bar (audio source and output format toggles)
• M7: countdown with a user-set delay
• M8: niceties (desktop notification, clipboard path, REC indicator and timer)

Architecture

See docs/ARCHITECTURE.md for the module layout and the full data flow from launch to saved file.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md and the Code of Conduct. Security reports go through SECURITY.md.

License

GPL-3.0-or-later. See LICENSE.