Toolbars

Wayscriber has a compact top strip for fast drawing controls and a larger side palette for the rest of the active workflow. Press F2 or F9 to toggle both bars.

Top strip

The top strip keeps the frequent controls close to the canvas:

• drawing tools and a Shapes popover;
• annotation actions such as Text, Sticky Note, Screenshot, and Highlight;
• quick colors plus the current-color picker and screen eyedropper;
• Undo, Redo, Clear, drag, minimize, and pin controls.

The screenshot button is hidden by default. Enable top.utility.screenshot in the overlay Customize tab, the configurator, or ui.toolbar.items.

Short current keybindings appear as badges on tools, actions, and the first eight quick colors. The badges follow your configured bindings rather than showing hard-coded defaults. Longer modifier chords remain in tooltips. When the strip gets narrow, color swatches reduce first, lower-priority controls move into an overflow popover, and the remaining controls use a compact presentation.

Side palette

The side palette is split into four panes:

• Draw: colors, presets, thickness, and tool-specific controls.
• Canvas: actions, boards, pages, zoom, and step controls.
• Session: Open, Save As, Info, Clear, recent sessions, and Manager.
• Settings: layout mode, section toggles, configurator/config shortcuts, and the toolbar customization editor.

Each pane remembers its own scroll position. Sections can collapse to their header, and the active pane and collapsed sections persist across restarts.

The Draw pane’s color section and the color picker popup both include a screen eyedropper button. It enters a modal crosshair with a magnified pixel loupe; click to apply the sampled color, or press Escape/right-click to cancel.

The minimize button collapses either bar to a small edge restore tab; it does not make the toolbar unreachable. Pinning and full visibility remain separate controls.

GTK4 and builtin frontends

Default builds include two frontends with the same controls and configuration:

• GTK4 is selected automatically when Wayscriber can use separate layer-shell toolbar surfaces.
• Builtin uses Wayscriber’s Cairo renderer and is used for forced-inline layouts, unsupported compositor paths, GTK-less builds, or if GTK startup fails.

Choose explicitly in config.toml:

[ui.toolbar]
backend = "auto" # auto, gtk, or builtin

For a one-off override, set WAYSCRIBER_TOOLBAR_BACKEND=auto|gtk|builtin. gtk is a request rather than a guarantee: Wayscriber warns and falls back to the builtin frontend when that path cannot run.

Visibility and ordering

Simple, Regular, and Advanced are non-destructive layout presets. Explicit item choices survive mode changes. The overlay Customize tab and configurator can:

• show or hide supported tools, controls, and side sections;
• reorder top tools, top controls, and side-section blocks;
• restore the built-in order.

These edits are stored under ui.toolbar.items. Unknown future IDs are preserved when an older version saves the file.