grim VS wayland-protocols

"GNOME doesn't support wlr-screencopy-unstable-v1, which is the protocol grim uses to take screenshots." Source.

It's in the README

there is grim which is supposed to work under Wayland but it seems like it only works under swayWM, the reason why i need a cli tool is that I want to build Rofi script on top of it, I'm a ware spectacle and it is a very great option but I would prefer a Rofi based tool .

sway laptop user here (for almost 2 years I think?).

I spent a little while on this, but I migrated from i3, so I just ported every little section of my config bit by bit.

In terms of battery bar and other "bar" type things, I use waybar[0] which basically does all the things you'd expect by default (just install and it "works").

For multi-monitor, config, I initially setup with wdisplays[1] (think arandr for wayland) and then manually copied the positions into my sway config. Monitor positioning was the only thing I needed to setup (and telling it that one monitor was HDPI) and then all of the scaling and everything worked perfectly. This was my biggest selling point for wayland, I now get nice crisp fonts and application scaling works nicely (which was not the case with X).

volume control from the keyboard took no time, just a couple of extra lines.

There was some stuff to do with the clipboard (wl-clipboard[2]) and screenshots (grim[3] + slurp[4]) that required some setup, but again, just a few lines, and didn't take much mental load.

Oh and I needed to change my notifications daemon(dunst[5]), and chose to change my program launcher to one with a nicer interface and cleaner fonts (wofi[6]).

I think that's all the tweaking that I did. Oh, and I needed to do something with pipewire to sort out screensharing at the start, don't remember that too well though...

[0] https://github.com/Alexays/Waybar

[1] https://github.com/artizirk/wdisplays

[2] https://github.com/bugaevc/wl-clipboard

[3] https://github.com/emersion/grim

[4] https://github.com/emersion/slurp

[5] https://github.com/dunst-project/dunst

[6] https://hg.sr.ht/~scoopta/wofi

grim might work well but you'll probably have to write a shell script or something to keep track of the user preferences. You'll also need slurp if you want to select a region to screenshot.

Screenshots: grim + slurp + swappy

Since you have already noticed that it does not work with Wayland, it is a strange requirement to take a screenshot "with it". Why not use a tool that does work with wayland, e.g. Grim?

# Details I'm an English speaker living abroad, and while I'm trying to learn the local language it's real hard. I found myself popping open a browser to use deepl quite frequently, or trying to find translator plugins for several different applications. To make this process easier, I wrote a script (bound to a hotkey) which will screenshot a selected area, OCR it, translate it to english, and show a notification with the translated text. It also copies the translated text to the clipboard. Why screenshot + OCR rather than just selecting and copying text? Images and screen-sharing, mostly. I think this is just a really cool way to show how the hard parts have usually been done for you, and all you need to do is put the blocks together. ## Implementation I'm running sway, so the several of the tools are Wayland specific. You could easily swap them out for xorg compatible variants if you like. The script is [here](https://github.com/rbuchberger/dotfiles/blob/master/scripts/screenshot\_translate). The toolchain is: * [Slurp](https://github.com/emersion/slurp) - select an area * [Grim](https://github.com/emersion/grim) - screenshot that area * [Tesseract](https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract) - OCR * [Translate Shell](https://www.soimort.org/translate-shell/) - Translation CLI * [Mako](https://github.com/emersion/mako) - Notification window Mako needed a little configuration to show long form text: [category=translation] width=900 height=1200 Edit: added details and links for the tools used.

I don't wanna poop on their parade, but haven't Wayland screenshotters been around for a while? https://github.com/emersion/grim

That one has at least been around for long enough, and has worked perfectly under Sway for long enough, that I had to look up its name because I had it bound to a hotkey and had forgotten what it was called.

I was wondering which .so contains the symbols for https://github.com/wayland-project/wayland-protocols/blob/main/unstable/input-method/input-method-unstable-v1.xml.

I was researching the issue and noticed wlr-screencapture. I was hoping to see it at https://github.com/wayland-project/wayland-protocols too, but no luck. Thanks for the lead on xfg-desktop-portal.

It is fascinating watching the near decade-long journey as Wayland tackles screenshots.

> Nothing is thrown away -> xserver is there for exactly this reason. Adding the extension for a system with bad abstraction is not too wise, but if you wanted to understand it, you would have done so already based on the video.

I did watch the video, and while I was convinced that the X.org reference implementation was crusty, I was not convinced that there was anything inherently wrong with X11-the-protocol. Like, if there existed an X extension whose responsibility was just to get clients set up with their own video buffers that it could composite for them, then it sounds like it would address 90% of Wayland's value proposition. Is there a particular video snippet you want me to pay special attention to that clarifies this?

> Why would it be lost? There is a core protocol that absolutely specifies it.

I read through the stable interface definitions in the wayland-protocols repo [1], and did not see anything related to controlling which programs get to see which events. Is this still in development (or unstable)? If so, is there an ETA at which point I can expect every correct Wayland compositor to faithfully implement it?

> And when you had only one player in the whole game.. which is pretty contradictory to your last sentence.

That's because the X server implements the mechanisms, not policies, for multiplexing the screen and input devices. In the service of this, it provides tools to enumerate, identify, query, modify, and extend properties of windows, as well as route messages between them. There was never a compelling need for multiple competing incompatible X servers because X is the narrow waist (i.e. an unopinionated digital commons) shared by software that competed on policy.

> I didn’t address these things because basically everything has a solution under wayland nowadays. Please have a look at the wayland-protocol repo and see for yourself the state of it. Also, wayland is a display manager, just because the X server was a monolith, it had no place to eg. manage clipboard. Actually, Wayland is the one that fulfills the UNIX philosophy of do one thing (although I don’t find the UNIX philosophy a good thing in every case)

I read through the unstable interface definitions, and see that Wayland is indeed trying to implement not only the same kinds IPC facilities and input device multiplexing that X provided, but also is trying to impose stronger opinions on what types of windows exist and how they behave (e.g. Wayland has a notion of pop-ups, text inputs, and so on). So if Wayland's goal is to avoid being as "monolithic" as X, it appears to be failing.

Also, putting core functionality that everyone must implement the same way into extensions just so they can call Wayland "just a protocol" or "just a display manager" is disingenuous. They might as well just say that they're part of the core protocol.

> No, you just use wlroots that implemented the “crap-ton” of extensions for you already, and be on your way.

Does the wlroots project define what extensions are standard and required for a piece of software to call itself a Wayland compositor? No? Then "just use wlroots" isn't addressing the problem of making sure these compositors are compliant to a set of common, useful standards. Like, maybe wlroots should be the standard-definer, just as X was? What happens with window managers built with a compositor that is not wlroots?

[1] I was looking here: https://github.com/wayland-project/wayland-protocols

Virtual keyboard: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=427972 it is still a hot-topic on the protocol definition side with the current definition https://github.com/wayland-project/wayland-protocols/blob/master/unstable/text-input/text-input-unstable-v3.xml still not satisfactory, this was one of the subject of this weekend Plasma Wayland online Sprint. The Virtual keyboard is especially important for different input methods, aka chinese, japanese, koreans characters. You may want to setup http://maliit.github.io/ on your system.

The protocol XML files have remarkable, concise documentation of each request, event and interface. Core protocol. Other protocols.