wayscriber – live annotation & whiteboard app for Linux (stylus also)

hey, i've been hacking for a long time with Rust on a zoomit-style app/overlay/annoyator for linux, and i just pushed wayscriber v0.83 🙂 finally ready to share with folks outside Hyprland as well.

It is open source on GitHub:
https://github.com/devmobasa/wayscriber

Now with toggleable GUI interface as well, and it works with stylus also.

GIF preview: https://wayscriber.com/demo.gif

It started as a very simple real-time annotation tool with only freehand and arrow/rectangle shape..

welp, several weeks fast forward, and I added bunch more features, and ended up with quite a codebase… all more than I planned for, mostly other people requesting ( but… I swear… all the features made sense!)

what it does (in short)

• draw over anything: pen, straight lines, rectangles, ellipses, arrows, multiline text, choose colors etc.
• undo, redo, save session etc
• use it as a whiteboard/blackboard or transparent overlay on top of your actual apps
• quickly hide / redact parts of the screen (nice for demos, support, recording)
• built‑in screenshot helpers (region, active window, fullscreen) to file or clipboard
• freeze screen mode so viewers see a paused frame while apps keep running
• runs either as a one-shot (wayscriber --active) or a small background daemon you toggle with a hotkey

it’s basically a live drawing / annotation layer for your screen. you hit a hotkey, screen fades, and you can scribble, highlight stuff, freeze screen, undo everything and redo everything, hide bits of the screen and grab quick screenshots.

---

v0.8 focus: KDE Wayland + beyond

until v0.7 it was very hyprland‑focused, v0.8 tries to play nicer with the bigger players:

• KDE Plasma / KWin (Wayland) – uses layer‑shell, so the overlay actually sits on top like it should, and all works great
• GNOME – works via the xdg fallback; you can draw over windows and desktop, but can’t paint over the top bar (portal / compositor limits, not me crying about 47 failed tries to fix it… ok maybe a bit)
• still works on wlroots compositors like Hyprland, Sway, Wayfire, River, Niri etc.

real hardware i’ve tested on so far:

• Ubuntu 25.10 GNOME and KDE
• Fedora 43 KDE and GNOME
• Debian 13.2 KDE and GNOME
• Arch with Hyprland
• Niri was tested as well

if you get it running somewhere else, would love to hear.

---

install (desktop stuff only, for now)

Debian / Ubuntu (.deb):

“`bash
wget -O wayscriber-amd64.deb \
<a href="https://github.com/devmobasa/wayscriber/releases/latest/download/wayscriber-amd64.deb">https://github.com/devmobasa/wayscriber/releases/latest/download/wayscriber-amd64.deb</a>

sudo apt install ./wayscriber-amd64.deb

“`

Fedora/RHEL (.rpm)

“`

wget -O wayscriber-x86_64.rpm \
<a href="https://github.com/devmobasa/wayscriber/releases/latest/download/wayscriber-x86_64.rpm">https://github.com/devmobasa/wayscriber/releases/latest/download/wayscriber-x86_64.rpm</a>

sudo rpm -Uvh wayscriber-x86_64.rpm
“`

Arch (AUR):

yay -S wayscriber

or prebuilt
yay -S wayscriber-bin

on other distros you can build from source (needs a recent version of rust), and for best screenshot workflow you probably want wl-clipboard, grim and slurp installed.

what i’d love feedback on

• KDE Wayland: does the overlay behave nicely on multi‑monitor / mixed‑DPI setups?
• GNOME: any weirdness besides the top bar no‑draw area? (that’s kinda expected sadly)
• other compositors i didn’t list above
• any horrible performance / latency issues on low end hardware