snib

A thumbnail window/display picker for Wayland screen sharing, drawn as an edge-anchored layer-shell bar. snib enumerates every capturable window and output, grabs a live thumbnail of each, and lets you pick one with the mouse or keyboard. The choice is printed to stdout, so it slots in as the chooser for xdg-desktop-portal-wlr.

• Live thumbnails of both windows and displays, captured natively over a single Wayland connection.
• Occlusion-correct window capture via ext-image-copy-capture-v1 driven straight from ext-foreign-toplevel-list-v1 handles.
• Keyboard-driven: fuzzy-ish substring search, vi-style navigation, and one-key switching between the window and display lists.
• Anchor the bar to any screen edge (top/bottom → horizontal, left/right → vertical).
• Catppuccin Mocha theme built in, fully restylable with your own CSS and ready for matugen / pywal templating.

• A wlroots-based compositor (Sway, Hyprland, river, …) that implements ext-foreign-toplevel-list-v1, ext-image-capture-source-v1, and ext-image-copy-capture-v1.
• GTK 4.14+ and the gtk4-layer-shell library.

On Arch:

sudo pacman -S gtk4 gtk4-layer-shell

cargo build --release
install -Dm755 target/release/snib ~/.local/bin/snib

Run snib and it opens the picker bar. Select a source and its formatted line is printed to stdout:

$ snib
Window: <toplevel-identifier>

The w, d, h/l, /, and cancel keys are rebindable — see Keybindings under Configuration.

xdg-desktop-portal-wlr runs a chooser command and reads the selected output's name from stdout. Point it at snib in ~/.config/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr/config:

[screencast]
chooser_type=simple
chooser_cmd=snib

# screenshot a specific window
grim -T $(snib -m window -f "{id}") window.png
# screenshot a specific display
grim -o $(snib -m display -f "{id}") display.png

# record the selected display
wf-recorder -o $(snib -m display -f "{id}") -f recording.mp4

Every flag has an environment-variable equivalent, so you can set defaults once and override per-invocation.

The --output-format string supports the placeholders {type}, {id}, {title}, and {app_id}, plus any extra fields provided by --extra-cmd (see below).

Set SNIB_DEBUG=1 to print capture diagnostics to stderr.

Navigation keys can be remapped in ~/.config/snib/config.toml. See config.example.toml for the full set of defaults.

[keybinds]
cancel   = "Escape"  # cancel and exit
search   = "slash"   # open the search row
windows  = "w"       # show the window list
displays = "d"       # show the display list
next     = "l"       # move the selection forward
prev     = "h"       # move the selection backward

To template on anything not provided by wayland itself, you can use --extra-cmd. snib runs the command once, parses its output, and merges the fields into every source's template, matched by foreign-toplevel identifier.

The command must print JSON shaped as { "<identifier>": { "<field>": value } }:

{
  "abc123": { "pid": 4242, "app_id": "firefox", "con_id": "97" }
}

Each inner key becomes a placeholder for use with--output-format.

The examples/ directory has a ready-made sway-tree.jq that reshapes swaymsg -t get_tree into the expected form. Copy it alongside your other config:

mkdir -p ~/.config/snib/templates
cp examples/sway-tree.jq ~/.config/snib/templates/

This opens up additional wm specific functionality such as:

# Switch focus to the selected ewindow
swaymsg [con_id=$(snib -m window --extra-cmd="swaymsg -t get_tree | jq -f ~/.config/snib/templates/sway-tree.jq" -f "{con_id}")] focus

# Kill the selected window process
kill -9 $(snib -m window --extra-cmd="swaymsg -t get_tree | jq -f ~/.config/snib/templates/sway-tree.jq" -f "{pid}")

The built-in style.css is compiled into the binary. To restyle, copy it and edit, the user file is loaded at a higher priority:

mkdir -p ~/.config/snib
cp style.css ~/.config/snib/style.css
cp colors.css ~/.config/snib/colors.css

snib loads, in increasing priority: the built-in theme, then ~/.config/snib/style.css (or $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/snib/style.css), then any file passed via --style.

GPL-3.0-or-later.