scrannotate

Screen. Annotate. Done.

scrannotate is a fast, keyboard-friendly screenshot annotation tool for Wayland. It captures your screen through the XDG Desktop Portal, freezes the frame fullscreen, and lets you select, annotate, and ship — copy to the clipboard or save a PNG — without ever leaving that one surface. No editor window, no dialogs, no save prompts.

Highlights

• One surface, no modes to escape. The capture fills the screen with full-screen crosshairs; drag out the region (its edges extend as guide lines while you drag) and a toolbar appears beside it. The region stays adjustable — with its own handles — right up until you copy.
• Every annotation stays live. Nothing is baked in until export. With the Select tool, click any placed item to move it, resize it with handles, rotate it with the knob, restyle it, or delete it. Undo/redo throughout.
• Ten tools: Select, Pen, Line, Arrow, Box, Ellipse, Highlight, Blur (pixelate), Text, and auto-numbered Markers — drag a marker and an arrow grows out of it (one object; each end drags independently).
• Inline text. Text is typed directly on the image in its final font and color — no popup editor — and never soft-wraps; lines break only where you press Shift+Enter. Double-click any text, with any tool, to edit it again.
• Settings that know their target. The toolbar's settings section is labeled "For Current Object" or "For New Objects" and shows the target's actual color/width/size. A large color picker keeps your recently used colors one click away.
• Pixel-identical export. The PNG/clipboard renderer (tiny-skia) shares its geometry with the on-screen renderer, so what you see is exactly what you ship — including rotated shapes and rotated text.
• Respectful of your flow. Copy (Enter/Ctrl+C) puts the region on the clipboard and quits; Save (Ctrl+S) writes a PNG instantly and stays open; Esc steps back and double-Esc discards — never a confirmation dialog. Preferences (recent colors, deliberately-set sizes) persist between runs.

Install

Linux with Rust 1.88+. Build dependencies:

sudo apt install libpipewire-0.3-dev clang pkg-config

Runtime: PipeWire and xdg-desktop-portal (present on any GNOME, KDE, or wlroots desktop), plus wl-clipboard — copying spawns wl-copy, whose forked child keeps serving the clipboard after scrannotate quits (a Wayland clipboard normally dies with its owner). Without it, copy falls back to an in-process clipboard that only survives if a clipboard manager grabs it.

cargo build --release
install -Dm755 target/release/scrannotate ~/.local/bin/scrannotate

Bind it to your screenshot key (e.g. in GNOME: Settings → Keyboard → Custom Shortcuts → scrannotate on Print).

Usage

scrannotate                      # capture, select a region, annotate in place
scrannotate --full               # start with the whole screen already selected
scrannotate --delay 3            # wait 3s before capturing (open that menu first)
scrannotate --cursor             # include the mouse cursor in the capture
scrannotate --pick-monitor       # re-open the monitor chooser (otherwise the saved grant is reused)
scrannotate --from-file img.png  # annotate an existing image (no capture)
scrannotate --from-file img.png --region   # …starting at region selection
scrannotate --output DIR         # where Ctrl+S saves (default ~/Pictures/Screenshots)

The first capture shows the desktop's screen-share dialog (that's also where you pick the monitor); the granted portal token is saved so subsequent captures skip it. To capture a different monitor, use --pick-monitor or the small "Change screen…" button at the top of the selection screen.

The flow

1. Select — the frozen frame appears with a crosshair under the cursor. Drag out the region; while dragging, the box edges extend across the whole screen so you can align both corners precisely. The region can be moved, resized, or redrawn (right-drag anywhere) at any time.
2. Annotate — the toolbar appears beside the region (drag its • • • grip to move it). Pick a tool and draw. Markers drop with a click, or drag one to pull an arrow out of it. Text is typed inline; Shift+Enter for new lines.
3. Refine — tap Space (or S) for the Select tool: hover highlights what's clickable; click to select, drag to move, handles resize, the curved-arrow knob rotates, the four-arrow knob moves text, Del deletes. The settings panel edits whatever is selected — or the defaults when nothing is.
4. Ship — Enter/Ctrl+C copies the region and quits. Ctrl+S saves a PNG and keeps going. Esc Esc discards everything, no questions asked.

Keys

The color picker

Click the color swatch in the toolbar's settings section:

Recently used colors form a most-recently-used stack (clicking one loads it into the picker), and colors you actually draw with bubble to its head. The recents — plus stroke width and text size once you've deliberately adjusted them — persist in $XDG_STATE_HOME/scrannotate/prefs; untouched sizes stay resolution-scaled defaults.

How it works

Wayland doesn't let applications read the screen directly, so scrannotate asks the XDG Desktop Portal for a screencast stream (via pinray/PipeWire), takes a single frame, and shows it frozen in a fullscreen window — everything you do happens on that frozen frame. Annotations live as vector objects until export, when a tiny-skia rasterizer that shares geometry with the on-screen egui renderer draws them into the final PNG.

One workaround worth knowing about: pinray 0.2.4 only logs the portal restore token instead of returning it, so capture.rs catches it with a tracing layer. Drop that when pinray exposes the token properly.

Running inside a container (development)

Capture needs the host's session D-Bus socket (PipeWire itself arrives as a file descriptor over the portal's OpenPipeWireRemote):

docker run ... \
  -v $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/wayland-0:/run/user/1000/wayland-0 \
  -v $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/bus:/run/user/1000/bus \
  -e WAYLAND_DISPLAY=wayland-0 \
  -e DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=unix:path=/run/user/1000/bus

Without the bus mount, --from-file still works (annotation only), and the UI can be exercised headlessly under Xvfb — see CONTRIBUTING.md.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md — note that submissions transfer their IP to the project (contributions are copyright-assigned, and the project is distributed under Apache 2.0).

License

Apache License 2.0 — Copyright 2026 Jason Garber.