Screen Record

screenrecord.sh is a mindless, yet useful, script to record your screen in sway.

Really, it doesn't do anything else.

Why?

Because I had enough bringing up shells, using tiresome aliases, or, god forbid, firing up a whole OBS Studio just to record my screen.

I wanted a simple keyboard shortcut to toggle screen recording on and off at will, and I have the impression other people may wish the same.

Does it depend on anything?

Yes, to use screenrecord.sh you need:

• xdg-user-dir to find out your user's VIDEOS directory.
• wf-recorder for the actual screen recording functionality.
• mako, or any other notification manager that may be triggered via notify-send.
• jq to parse JSON from command line.
• slurp to select a screen area.

These lovely utilities are often already available on many sway setups.

How do I use it?

1. Either clone the repo or copy the latest screenrecord.sh somewhere in your home. For the sake of this example, let's assume you placed screenrecord.sh in some $HOME/bin directory.

2. Customize your ~/.config/sway/config and register some shortcuts to record your screen, e.g.:

     set $screenrecord "$HOME/bin/screenrecord.sh"
     bindsym $mod+r exec $screenrecord -t
     bindsym $mod+Shift+r exec $screenrecord -wt
     bindsym $mod+Control+r exec $screenrecord -st
   

   You should now be able to record your screen with those shortcuts.

3. If you're using a status bar (e.g. i3status), you can easily customize it to react to screenrecord.sh pidfile, for example in your ~/.i3status.conf:

     order += "run_watch screenrecord"
   
     run_watch screenrecord {
       pidfile = "/var/run/user/1000/screenrecord.pid"
       format = "🎥"
       format_down = ""
    }
   

Special thanks

This script is loosely based on the following gist:

https://gist.github.com/ugursogukpinar/f390d9f4c829fb1b05fc74a12dd482bb

License

Public domain, enjoy this code at will and use it at your own risk.

See unlicense.org for details or read the LICENSE file.

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Cheers :)