Creating GIF in swaywm by keyboard-driven method

where can I find a simple GIF-making app?

I’ve been looking for a simple app to make GIFs, however most of the exising apps are a bit bloated.

To make matters worse, most of them do not support Wayland natively 😕.

While I was searching, I came across this simple script which’s just what I needed. Hence this post.

See more info, Please visit an elegant approach using wlrecorder and slurp

1. Prerequisite

  • zenity
  • slurp
  • wf-recorder
  • ffmpeg

use your favorite package manager to install dependencies mentioned above.

pacman -S zentiy slurp wf-recorder ffmpeg

2. Bash Script

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# If an instance of wf-recorder is running under this user kill it with SIGINT and exit
pkill --euid "$USER" --signal SIGINT wf-recorder && exit

# Define paths
DefaultSaveDir='/home/nobody/GIFs'
TmpPathPrefix='/tmp/gif-record'
TmpRecordPath=$TmpPathPrefix'-cap.mp4'
TmpPalettePath=$TmpPathPrefix'-palette.png'

# Trap for cleanup on exit
OnExit() {
	[[ -f $TmpRecordPath ]] && rm -f "$TmpRecordPath"
	[[ -f $TmpPalettePath ]] && rm -f "$TmpPalettePath"
}
trap OnExit EXIT

# Set umask so tmp files are only acessible to the user
umask 177

# Get selection and honor escape key
Coords=$(slurp) || exit

# Capture video using slup for screen area
# timeout and exit after 10 minutes as user has almost certainly forgotten it's running
timeout 600 wf-recorder -g "$Coords" -f "$TmpRecordPath" || exit

# Get the filename from the user and honor cancel
SavePath=$( zenity \
	--file-selection \
	--save \
	--confirm-overwrite \
	--file-filter=*.gif \
	--filename="$DefaultSaveDir"'/.gif' \
) || exit

# Append .gif to the SavePath if it's missing
[[ $SavePath =~ \.gif$ ]] || SavePath+='.gif'

# Produce a pallete from the video file
ffmpeg -i "$TmpRecordPath" -filter_complex "palettegen=stats_mode=full" "$TmpPalettePath" -y || exit

# Return umask to default
umask 022

# Use pallete to produce a gif from the video file
ffmpeg -i "$TmpRecordPath" -i "$TmpPalettePath" -filter_complex "paletteuse=dither=sierra2_4a" "$SavePath" -y || exit

3. Set shortcut

Make sure this script is executable.

chmod +x wgifcap

In swaywm, binding to a shortcut.

bindsym $mod2+q exec wgifcap

4. Experiment

  • Type $mod2+q will let you select a region to be recorded.
  • Do whatever you want. (please note that the region will not show border lines.)
  • Type $mod2+q again will stop recording, and will let you type the GIF filename to be saved.