Vellum

vellum is a small native Wayland overlay for drawing directly over the live desktop, tested on niri.

Vellum began as a fork of Chameleos by Thomas Lindae.

Start the overlay once, then toggle drawing from a compositor shortcut:

vellum &
vellum toggle

For example, in niri:

Mod+A { spawn "vellum" "toggle"; }

Drag selection handles to reshape supported elements. While drawing, Shift constrains geometry and Alt draws rectangles and ellipses from their center.

Run vellum --help for startup options and commands. Packaged releases also provide man vellum with the same command-line reference.

See Configuration for the available options, defaults, and file lookup order.

{
  imports = [inputs.vellum.homeModules.default];
  services.vellum.enable = true;
}

sudo pacman -S --needed base-devel git rust wayland libxkbcommon libglvnd vulkan-icd-loader

sudo dnf install cargo gcc git pkgconf-pkg-config wayland-devel libxkbcommon-devel libglvnd-egl vulkan-loader

Then build:

git clone https://github.com/greyxp1/vellum
cd vellum
cargo build --release --locked

With Nix, skip the system dependencies and run nix build, or use nix develop for a development shell.