Taffy

Taffy is a small Rust screen capture app for modern Wayland desktops, with a focus on Arch Linux and COSMIC. It aims to stay simple, approachable, and practical while still covering the everyday capture tasks: screenshots, videos, and GIFs.

Current Features

• Screenshot capture through the XDG Screenshot portal
• Video recording through the ScreenCast portal and GStreamer
• GIF capture by recording to video first and converting with ffmpeg
• Whole-screen recording
• Region recording through a selection flow
• Configurable frame rate
• Configurable start and stop delay
• Pointer visibility toggle
• Per-type output folders for screenshots, GIFs, and videos
• Embedded window icon and Linux application id
• Keyboard shortcut preferences for start, stop, and screenshot
• Focused-window shortcut handling when global shortcuts are unavailable

Current Behavior On COSMIC

• Taffy works through the portal stack first so it behaves better on Wayland and newer desktops.
• On the current COSMIC portal backend, ScreenCast and Screenshot are available.
• On the current COSMIC portal backend, GlobalShortcuts is not exposed, so compositor-wide shortcuts are not currently available through the standard portal path.
• Taffy therefore only receives shortcuts while its own window is focused, and it surfaces that limitation in the UI.
• In practice on COSMIC, this means screenshot shortcuts are not very useful when the Taffy window needs to stay out of the shot.
• In practice on COSMIC, video and GIF capture should currently be treated as a start-and-stop-from-the-Taffy-window workflow.

Selection Mode

Selection mode currently works like this:

1. Taffy asks the ScreenCast portal for a monitor source.
2. After permission is granted, Taffy uses slurp to collect the region rectangle.
3. Taffy records the full granted monitor stream.
4. After recording stops, Taffy crops the finished file with ffmpeg using the actual recorded video dimensions.

This approach is intentional for now because it is more reliable than doing live cropping inside the recording pipeline on scaled displays.

Runtime Requirements

On Arch Linux, install at least:

• xdg-desktop-portal
• xdg-desktop-portal-cosmic or another portal backend appropriate for your session
• pipewire
• gstreamer
• gst-plugins-good
• gst-plugins-bad
• gst-plugins-ugly
• ffmpeg
• slurp for Selection mode recording

Example:

sudo pacman -S xdg-desktop-portal xdg-desktop-portal-cosmic pipewire gstreamer gst-plugins-good gst-plugins-bad gst-plugins-ugly ffmpeg slurp

Running

For development:

cargo run

Output Folders

By default, Taffy saves:

• Screenshots to ~/Pictures/Taffy
• Videos to ~/Videos/Taffy
• GIFs to ~/Videos/Taffy

These can be changed in the app preferences.

Shortcuts

Taffy currently supports three configurable shortcuts:

• Start recording
• Stop recording
• Take screenshot

Supported shortcut strings currently include:

• Letters and digits, such as Ctrl+I or Ctrl+Shift+R
• Print
• Space
• Tab
• Enter
• Escape

If the desktop ignores global shortcut binding, Taffy only sees shortcuts while the Taffy window is focused.

For current COSMIC users, the practical guidance is:

• screenshots should usually be taken another way if the Taffy window would be visible
• videos and GIFs should generally be started and stopped from the Taffy UI, with any extra beginning or ending trimmed afterward if needed

Taskbar Icon Notes

Taffy embeds icon.png into the app window and also sets its Linux application id to taffy.

If your desktop still does not show the taskbar icon when launching with cargo run, the desktop may be preferring desktop-entry integration over the raw window icon. In that case, install the desktop file and icon into your local application directories.

Desktop Integration

The project includes a desktop entry at assets/taffy.desktop.

For launcher integration, copy it to:

~/.local/share/applications/taffy.desktop

Then make sure an icon named taffy is available to your icon theme, or adapt the desktop entry to point at an explicit icon path.

Project Docs

• OVERVIEW.md: technical overview and development guide
• CHANGELOG.md: project history so far
• LICENSE: Apache 2.0 license

Current Limitations

• COSMIC does not currently expose the Global Shortcuts portal interface used by Taffy.
• Because of that, COSMIC users do not currently get true background screenshot or recording shortcuts.
• Selection mode depends on slurp right now.
• The recording timer is in the app UI; there is not yet a floating in-recording overlay.
• Audio and microphone capture are not implemented yet.
• The region-selection flow is functiona.