Turns out GNOME Shell has the same problem: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/6565

I also wrote it down in a more detailed form on the niri issues for future reference: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/issues/3201

niri can now include the mouse pointer on window screenshots, a feature that had several more edge cases than I thought before starting to work on it (and it's likely not the ones you think, those ones were easy)

#niri

Merged another long time overdue niri PR: mouse cursor via metadata in PipeWire screencasts (lets you toggle Show Cursor on/off in OBS), and full mouse cursor support in window casts.

The cursor is visible only when the window is receiving mouse events—if you're moving the mouse on top of something else covering the target window, the cursor won't be (unintentionally) painted.

Thanks @abmantis for driving this, including debugging a memory bug in PW!

#niri

Working on a screencast IPC for niri. The idea is to give info to desktop bars to be able to add a screencast indicator whenever something is recording the screen.

Got it hooked up for both PipeWire (obviously) and wlr-screencopy. For the latter there's no good way to tell if something is a screencast so I went with some heuristics.

Here's the icon working on the DMS bar, as well as a popup with the full available info I made for debugging.

#niri

Oh right, for PipeWire I can send the node ID, which DMS can then use to fetch the consumer application name!

#niri

The screencast IPC is now merged: https://yalter.github.io/niri/niri_ipc/struct.Cast.html

#niri

Also added niri msg action stop-cast to force-stop a PipeWire screencast

#niri

working on my new visual style

#niri

So yeah, I'm working on blur for niri. I'm doing "xray blur" first where the idea is that you only include background surfaces, so you pretty much never have to redo the blur—next to zero perf impact unless you have a video wallpaper or smth.

Turns out that it's quite tricky to do well, especially with our Overview. I'm like on my third refactor attempt now but I think I've got a good approach.

During this video there's no reblurring whatsoever, all just drawing cached static textures.

#niri

Added non-xray blur, based on @drakulix's Smithay/COSMIC implementation.

Keep in mind this blur work is still extremely WIP and with many issues (some visible on the video). It's also still not entirely clear to me how to best structure the code around it in niri. We'll see

#niri

Alright, getting somewhere! I think I've figured out a good code structure for the xray blur. It now correctly works even inside offscreens (opening animation, and when you drag a window targeting the tiling layout), and it should also work properly with the upcoming screen magnifier (that we have in pull requests).

Still not a single blur re-render in this entire video!

#niri