Miru: A Wayland-Native Zooming Daemon

Miru is a keybind-driven screen magnifier and cursor spotlight tool for Wayland, written in C. Inspired by boomer, it freezes your screen into a zoomed view on demand, with no GUI, no XWayland and no mouse-driven setup. When you're not using it, it sits at roughly 0% CPU.

Key Features

• Magnifier Mode: Freeze the screen into a fullscreen zoomed view centred on your cursor. Pan with the mouse, WASD or arrow keys, and zoom with scroll or +/-.
• Cursor Highlight: Press Tab to dim everything except a soft-edged circle that follows the pointer, even while zoomed. Resize it live with Shift+Plus/Minus or Ctrl+scroll.
• Loupe Mode: Drag a region and zoom only that area in a fixed-size window that follows your cursor. The shape can be a rectangle, ellipse or circle.
• Live Annotations: Draw arrows, rectangles, lines, ellipses, circles and typed text on the frozen frame with Shift+A.
• Image Filters: Cycle through grayscale, inverted and high-contrast views with F.
• Export: Save the current view as a .png or .bmp with Shift+E to drop into slides or share.
• Native Wayland Rendering: Uses wlr-layer-shell and wlr-screencopy directly, drawing the overlay with OpenGL ES 2 via EGL. It is HiDPI-aware, and zoom upscaling is configurable (nearest, linear, bicubic).
• Hot-Reloading TOML Config: Zoom, spotlight, annotation, loupe, export and filter settings update live when you save config.toml, with no restart.
• Built-in Help Panel: Press Shift+H or ? for an on-screen keybind cheat sheet.
• Standalone Spotlight (WIP): A click-through dim-around-cursor overlay that works alongside normal desktop use.
• Wide Compositor Support: Developed on Niri, and works with Sway, Hyprland, Mango, Nauka, SomeWM and Umbriel, with keybind examples for each in the README.

Installation

# Arch Linux (AUR)
paru -S miru-zoom

# Nix / NixOS
nix shell nixpkgs/nixos-unstable#miru -c miru-daemon

# Homebrew (Linuxbrew)
brew tap Vaishnav-Sabari-Girish/taps https://codeberg.org/Vaishnav-Sabari-Girish/homebrew-taps
brew install Vaishnav-Sabari-Girish/taps/miru

Usage Examples

Start the Daemon

miru-daemon

Toggle the Magnifier

miructl toggle

Zoom Into a Selected Region

miructl loupe

Dim Everything Around the Cursor

miructl spotlight

Bind It to a Key (Niri)

Mod+Z hotkey-overlay-title="toggle miru" { spawn-sh "miructl toggle"; }
Mod+Alt+Z hotkey-overlay-title="toggle miru loupe" { spawn-sh "miructl loupe"; }

Example Configuration

[zoom]
factor = 2.0
smooth = true
upscale = "bicubic"

[spotlight]
radius = 250
dim = 0.65

[export]
format = "png"

Why Miru?

Most Wayland screen magnifiers either don't exist or route through XWayland with visible artifacts. Miru talks to the compositor directly. The daemon blocks in poll() until you call it, and toggling is handled by a compositor-level keybind through the tiny miructl client. That is the secure Wayland way, with no root permissions and no raw keyboard reads.

Whether you're streaming, recording a tutorial, giving a talk or just squinting at small text, Miru gives you a fast and scriptable way to point at what matters.

Note: Requires a compositor that exposes wlr-layer-shell and wlr-screencopy. GNOME (Mutter) and KDE Plasma (KWin) are not currently supported.

Repo: https://codeberg.org/Vaishnav-Sabari-Girish/miru