Snipcast

Record a region of the screen from the Noctalia bar and get the finished file straight on the clipboard — so sending a clip to a chat is the same gesture as sending a screenshot: click, drag, click, Ctrl+V.

• ✂️ Region first — every recording starts with a slurp drag. No portal dialog, no window picker, no "share your entire screen" prompt.
• 🔇 Never any audio — wf-recorder is invoked without -a, so the mp4 has no audio stream at all. That is what makes Telegram play it as a looping GIF instead of showing a video player.
• 📋 Straight to the clipboard — the saved file is offered as text/uri-list, the format a file manager uses for a copied file, so chat clients paste it as an attachment.
• ⏱ A timer on the bar — the only reliable cue that a region tucked away in a corner is still recording.
• ⌨️ Drivable from a keybinding — the capture lives in a headless service, so it works with no widget on the bar.

Requirements

• Noctalia 5+
• A compositor with wlr-screencopy (anything grim works on: niri, Hyprland, Sway, river, …)
• wf-recorder and slurp on PATH

Install

noctalia msg plugins source add Snipcast git https://github.com/werdin/snipcast
noctalia msg plugins update Snipcast   # fetch the source
noctalia msg plugins enable werdin/snipcast

If the plugin doesn't appear right after adding the source, restart Noctalia so it fetches the new git source, then run the enable command.

Then add the Snipcast widget to a bar from Noctalia's widget picker (Settings → Bar → + Add widget). Adding it through the picker is what attaches the settings gear (⚙) — a hand-edited bar entry renders but has no settings.

Updating

noctalia msg plugins update Snipcast            # source name, see below
noctalia msg plugins disable werdin/snipcast
noctalia msg plugins enable  werdin/snipcast

⚠️ The argument to plugins update is the source name you passed to source add, and it is case-sensitive. With a name that doesn't match, Noctalia still answers ok (updating in background) but fetches nothing — so a new setting silently fails to show up. Check the exact spelling with noctalia msg plugins source list, and confirm the new version landed with noctalia msg plugins list | head -1.

Usage

Action	Behavior
Left click	Pick a region and start recording — or stop the running one.
Right click	Record the whole focused output, skipping the region picker.
Middle click	Stop and throw the file away.

Pressing Esc (or right-clicking) during the slurp drag cancels quietly — cancelling is a normal outcome, not an error.

When the recording stops, the file is written to the configured folder, a notification names it, and — unless you turn copy_to_clipboard off — it is put on the clipboard. In Telegram, Mattermost, Discord or any GTK/Qt chat client, Ctrl+V then attaches it.

Keybinding

The capture runs in a headless service, so it can be driven with no widget placed:

noctalia msg plugin werdin/snipcast:service all toggle

niri, as a counterpart to a region-screenshot binding:

binds {
    "Mod+Shift+R" { spawn "noctalia" "msg" "plugin" "werdin/snipcast:service" "all" "toggle"; }
}

Settings

Setting	Type	Default	Description
directory	folder	~/Videos/Snipcast	Folder the recordings are written to.
filename_pattern	string	snip_%Y%m%d_%H%M%S	Date-format pattern, without the extension.
frame_rate	int	30	Capture frame rate.
encoder	select	cpu	cpu = libx264; vaapi = GPU encoding via h264_vaapi.
quality	int	23	Constant quality, 0–51. Lower is better looking and larger.
copy_to_clipboard	bool	true	Put the finished file on the clipboard.
show_timer	bool	true	Show elapsed time next to the icon (horizontal bars only).
max_duration	int	0	Stop automatically after N seconds; 0 disables the limit.
hide_inactive	bool	false	Hide the bar icon while idle.
vaapi_device	string	/dev/dri/renderD128	Render node used for GPU encoding.

IPC

Recording runs in a headless service, a singleton with no output, so the IPC target is always all:

noctalia msg plugin werdin/snipcast:service all start          # pick a region and record
noctalia msg plugin werdin/snipcast:service all start-output   # record the focused output
noctalia msg plugin werdin/snipcast:service all stop
noctalia msg plugin werdin/snipcast:service all toggle
noctalia msg plugin werdin/snipcast:service all abort          # stop and discard

Notes

• Region geometry and scaled outputs. slurp reports logical coordinates and wf-recorder -g expects the same, multiplying by the output scale itself. On a 4K display at scale 2, a 641×361 selection is captured as 1282×722 — matching grim -g on the same rectangle pixel for pixel.
• Even dimensions. Selections are rounded down to an even width and height, because h264 with yuv420p rejects odd ones.
• The cursor is always recorded; wf-recorder has no option to leave it out.
• Stopping sends SIGINT, which is what lets wf-recorder flush and close the muxer — the difference between a seekable mp4 and a truncated one. If it does not exit within five seconds it is killed outright.
• wf-recorder's own output is captured to ${XDG_STATE_HOME:-~/.local/state}/noctalia/snipcast/wf-recorder.log (truncated per run); when a recording fails, its tail is shown in the error notification.

License

MIT