The definitive command-line approach to recording selected screen areas in a Wayland environment.

👋 Hey everyone,

If you’re anything like me, you came to Sway on Arch Linux because you crave speed, control, and a beautifully minimal setup. The tiling window manager philosophy is about maximizing efficiency by living almost entirely in the terminal. But then comes the moment you need to record a specific, custom-sized region of your screen—a bug reproduction for a client, a quick tutorial for a colleague, or a polished clip for a GitHub issue. Suddenly, I found myself thinking: Do I really have to install a huge, X11-era, bloat-filled GUI application just for this? The answer, thankfully, is a resounding no.

The journey to find a truly native, terminal-only Wayland screen recorder that allows mouse-based area selection led me down a fascinating rabbit hole. I wanted a solution that was efficient, entirely free of graphical pop-ups, and perfectly integrated with the wlroots compositor used by Sway. The resulting combination of tools is pure command-line poetry.

My Goal This Week 🎯

My mission was clear: Achieve a single, elegant, runnable command that performs area selection screen recording with audio in a Wayland/Sway session. This command needed to:

  1. Be initiated from a terminal (like Alacritty or Foot).
  2. Allow me to dynamically select the recording area using the mouse.
  3. Record the screen (video).
  4. Capture microphone audio.
  5. Save the output to a common, high-quality video format.
  6. Be stoppable cleanly without leaving rogue processes behind.

This wasn’t just about recording; it was about upholding the minimalist, terminal-first ethos of the Sway environment.

The Process & The Code 👨‍💻

The solution lies in combining two powerful, purpose-built Wayland utilities: wf-recorder and slurp.

  • wf-recorder: This is a screen recording utility specifically built for Wayland compositors that use the wlr-screencopy-unstable-v1 protocol, which includes Sway. It uses FFmpeg for encoding, meaning you get access to all the video codecs and file formats you could ever need.
  • slurp: This simple but essential tool is a Wayland counterpart to the old X11 xrectsel. It allows you to interactively select a rectangular region of the screen using your mouse and, crucially, it prints the selected area’s geometry (e.g., x,y WxH) to standard output.

Step 1: Installation

Assuming you’re on Arch or an Arch-based distribution, installation is straightforward:

sudo pacman -S wf-recorder slurp ffmpeg

(Note: ffmpeg provides the codecs for wf-recorder to function.)

Step 2: The Core Command

The magic happens when you nest the slurp command inside the wf-recorder command using shell substitution ($()):

wf-recorder -g "$(slurp)" --audio -f my_perfect_screencast-$(date +%Y%m%d_%H%M%S).mp4

Breaking Down the Command:

  1. wf-recorder: Starts the screen recorder.
  2. -g "$(slurp)": This is the key. wf-recorder’s -g flag expects a geometry string. When the shell executes this, it first runs slurp. The screen dims, you use your mouse to select the area, and when you release the mouse button, slurp prints the area coordinates. This output is then immediately passed as the geometry argument to wf-recorder.
  3. --audio: Tells wf-recorder to also capture audio from your default source (usually your microphone via PipeWire or PulseAudio).
  4. -f my_perfect_screencast...: Specifies the output file name and format. I included $(date +%Y%m%d_%H%M%S) to ensure every recording has a unique, time-stamped file name, preventing accidental overwrites.
  5. Stopping the Recording: Once the command is running, you simply press Ctrl + C in the terminal where you launched it. The recording will finalize and the file will be saved.

Hitting The Wall 🧱

My initial attempts often resulted in massive video files or noticeable performance hitches, which completely defeated the purpose of using a minimalist Wayland setup. The default settings were functional but not optimal for modern hardware.

I realized the default codec (libx264) wasn’t being utilized efficiently. The problem wasn’t the core wf-recorder/slurp concept; it was the encoding parameters. Without GPU acceleration, even a small region recording can max out a CPU.

On my Intel/AMD system, I needed to leverage VAAPI (Video Acceleration API) for hardware encoding.

The Breakthrough Moment ✨

The real performance breakthrough came by explicitly defining the codec and providing a few key parameters, directly piping them into wf-recorder.

The Hardware-Accelerated Command (For Intel/AMD using VAAPI):

wf-recorder -g "$(slurp)" --audio \
  -c h264_vaapi -d /dev/dri/renderD128 \
  -p quality=5 \
  -f vaapi_screencast-$(date +%Y%m%d_%H%M%S).mp4
  • -c h264_vaapi: Selects the VAAPI-accelerated H.264 encoder.
  • -d /dev/dri/renderD128: Specifies the GPU device to use for encoding (this path may vary, check your system with ls /dev/dri/).
  • -p quality=5: Passes a codec parameter for video quality. A lower number means higher quality (for VAAPI, 5 is often a great balance between size and quality).

This single adjustment reduced my CPU load from 90% to under 15% during recording and produced a smaller, smoother, and higher-quality video. The lesson? A command-line tool is only as good as the parameters you feed it. Never settle for the defaults when hardware is involved!

📚 Recommended Resource

When you spend this much time optimizing your terminal environment and workflow, the next logical step is to master the tools you use every day. I highly recommend “The Linux Command Line” by William E. Shotts, Jr. This book isn’t just a manual; it’s a deep dive into the philosophy of the terminal. It provides the foundational knowledge necessary to understand why commands like wf-recorder -g "$(slurp)" work and how to leverage shell substitution, pipes, and I/O redirection to create your own bespoke, minimalist workflows. It’s invaluable for anyone building a system like a Sway/Arch desktop. Amazon

Key Takeaways 📚

  1. 💡 The Power of Synergy: The Wayland ecosystem thrives on small, single-purpose tools. The wf-recorder (video capture) + slurp (geometry selection) combo exemplifies this modular, Unix philosophy perfectly.
  2. ⚙️ Hardware Acceleration is Not Optional: For modern video encoding, always investigate your GPU’s capabilities (h264_vaapi, h264_nvenc, etc.) and explicitly include them with the -c and -d flags to save your CPU and guarantee smooth frame rates.
  3. 📚 Master the Shell: The ability to nest commands using shell substitution ($()) is what makes this entire GUI-less workflow possible. It removes the need for intermediary scripts or GUIs by feeding one command’s output directly as an argument to another.

Thanks for Following ☕

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What is your favorite two-tool combination that solves a complex task with a single, elegant terminal command?