ndots/openspec/changes/archive/2026-07-30-gif-recorder/proposal.md

Why

The Hyprland desktop has a screenshot flow but no equally convenient way to capture a short animated region of the screen. A Wayland-native GIF recorder should let the user select a region, press the same bind to stop, and receive the finished GIF in ~/Pictures/Screenshots and on the clipboard.

What Changes

• Add a new Home Manager module, modules/home-manager/gif-recorder, with a single enable option.
• Provide a Wayland-native recording script using wf-recorder and slurp to select and record a screen region.
• Toggle recording with one Hyprland bind: the first press starts region selection/recording and the next press stops it.
• Convert the recording to an optimized GIF after stopping.
• Save completed GIFs under ~/Pictures/Screenshots with timestamped filenames.
• Copy the completed GIF to the Wayland clipboard for immediate pasting.
• Enable the module from hosts/jpporta-nixos/home.nix and add only the required bind in the existing Hyprland Home Manager module.

Capabilities

New Capabilities

• gif-recorder: Select, toggle-record, save, and clipboard-copy short Wayland screen-region GIFs.

Modified Capabilities

• None.

Impact

• New Home Manager module and user-facing recording script.
• Existing modules/home-manager/hyprland/default.nix gains the toggle bind.
• hosts/jpporta-nixos/home.nix imports and enables the module.
• Adds the runtime packages wf-recorder, slurp, ffmpeg, and a Wayland clipboard utility through the module.
• Creates ~/Pictures/Screenshots when a recording is completed; existing screenshot behavior remains unchanged.