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Overlay vs Daemon

Overlay (one shot)

  • Starts immediately and exits when you close it
  • Simple and predictable
  • Best for quick annotations
  • Can open a named session with --session-file

Command:

wayscriber --active
wayscriber --active --session-file ~/Documents/lecture-04.wayscriber-session

Daemon (background)

  • Runs in the background and keeps your drawings between toggles
  • Faster to access during presentations
  • Works well with a keybind
  • Can be targeted by named-session toggle requests

Command:

wayscriber --daemon
wayscriber --daemon-toggle
wayscriber --daemon-toggle --session-file ~/Documents/meeting.wayscriber-session

If installed, the systemd user service is the most reliable way to keep the daemon running. Use only one compositor/global toggle binding; duplicate bindings can fire twice and immediately undo the toggle.

Overlay UI

The default overlay UI uses a top strip, contextual style pill, interactive chip HUD, and focused popovers:

  • The style pill contains color, size, and active-tool or selected-object properties.
  • The HUD opens the board picker, page controls, color picker, radial menu, and Help.
  • The overflow menu opens Canvas, Session, and Settings popovers. Canvas contains boards, pages, advanced history, zoom, and Step Undo/Redo controls. Session contains Open, Save As, Info, Clear, recents, and Manager. See Sessions and Session Manager.
  • Settings contains toolbar/status options, config/configurator shortcuts, section toggles, and customization.
  • A persistent bottom-right zoom chip shows the live percentage and exposes zoom-out, zoom-in, Fit, and (while zoomed) Lock controls.

Toolbar pins, minimized/pane/collapsed state, individual item visibility/order, and board pins are saved in generated runtime UI state, so they survive overlay and daemon restarts without rewriting authored defaults in config.toml. Settings shows the runtime-state status and provides reset and recovery actions. Authored toolbar section toggles still update config.toml. See Config File Overview.

Set ui.toolbar.side_layout = "panel" only when you need the deprecated four-pane Draw/Canvas/Session/Settings side palette. See Toolbars for the default layout, F2/F9 behavior, GTK4/builtin selection, and width-aware overflow.