Recommendation: Screen annotation software?

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Can anyone recommend a virtual laser pointer that works on Wayland/Xwayland across all apps, presentations, and video apps? Need to draw attention to my cursor in meetings. Could be a slide deck, my editor, in-browser, out-of-browser, zoom, Google Meet, etc

Cheers!

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Have you looking into the software listed here?

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That’s for screenshots. I am looking for an on-screen drawing (over the desktop) for presentations, essentially a laser pointer to draw attention to on-screen meeting items.

Thanks for the suggestion!

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yeah, I had a look, but there was nothing as I described.

Appreciate the link!

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Does changing the cursor not serve this usecase well?

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Haven’t tried Wayland/XWayland, but I always use highlight-pointer for this: GitHub - swillner/highlight-pointer: Highlight mouse pointer/cursor using a dot - useful for presentations, screen sharing, ...

I packaged it here for nix.

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Unfortunately I looked at that one as well, but it does not work on Wayland. Appreciate the link!

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Gnome has a thing where you tap the control key and it highlight the cursor position with an animated set of concentric circles, a bit like a target. It’s mostly intended for finding the cursor when you have a lot of screens and the pointer might be hard to see because it’s been set to a tiny icon or something, but it might be useful for this case too - perhaps in combination with another option when you find it.

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You could take a look at Projecteur (already in nixpkgs), which is fairly customizable, can be used with a mouse and supports Wayland.

A neat trick you can do is toggle the cursor theme on the fly, which you can map to a custom shortcut:

On Gnome, the script looks something like this for me:

if gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.interface cursor-theme | grep -i -q catppuccin; then
    gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface cursor-theme 'GoogleDot-Red'
    gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface cursor-size 24
else
    gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface cursor-theme 'catppuccin-macchiato-dark-cursors'
    gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface cursor-size 16
fi

One thing to note here is that this did not work with all applications in my system, possibly because I’m also using home.pointerCursor, which I don’t think you can change on the fly.

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