About this project

This project is built on top of the open-source repository clips. It preserves the original goals while adding more control over recording, camera, microphone, and post-processing.

The app has been converted from a pure web app to an Electron app to enable more reliable global mouse/keyboard event tracking during recording and now uses a native Rust backend for desktop capture and recording.

Added features

• More camera controls
• More microphone controls
• Native screen/window capture and recording via Rust instead of the browser MediaRecorder API
• Post-processing stage for recorded clips
  • Zoom/spotlight effects centered on mouse clicks
  • Ability to change and emphasize the mouse cursor during playback
• Optimized rendering/export pipeline for smoother previews and more reliable output

Technology used

• The UI is built using Svelte.
• Native desktop capture and recording is implemented in Rust and exposed to the app via napi-rs.
• Uses xcap for cross-platform screen and window capture.
• Uses global mouse tracking (e.g. mouse_position, rdev) to record cursor position, button state, and cursor shape for use in post-processing.
• Uses MediaDevices API for capturing webcam and microphone.
• Uses AudioContext API for audio visualizations.
• Uses HTML canvas for drawing the video and audio visualizations and for feeding frames into the rendering pipeline.

Prerequisites

• Node.js and pnpm installed
• Rust toolchain (for building the native module)
• ffmpeg available on your PATH (used for encoding the recorded video)

Running locally

Install dependencies and build the native Rust module, then start the app:

pnpm install
pnpm build:native
pnpm dev

Platform support / limitations

• Developed and tested primarily on Linux (X11) and Windows.
• macOS is not tested and may require additional work or permissions.
• The mouse cursor shape/change feature is currently only supported on Linux X11; other platforms will fall back to a simpler cursor experience.

Linux system requirements

To build the native Rust module (e.g. xcap and related crates) on Linux, you may need to install additional system packages.

• Debian / Ubuntu:

  sudo apt-get install pkg-config libclang-dev libxcb1-dev libxrandr-dev libdbus-1-dev libpipewire-0.3-dev libwayland-dev libegl-dev
  

• Alpine:

  sudo apk add pkgconf llvm19-dev clang19-dev libxcb-dev libxrandr-dev dbus-dev pipewire-dev wayland-dev mesa-dev
  

• Arch Linux:

  sudo pacman -S base-devel clang libxcb libxrandr dbus libpipewire
  

Contributing

This is my first maintained open-source project. I will be really happy if you:

• Open issues for bugs, crashes, or confusing behavior
• Suggest improvements to the recording pipeline, post-processing, or platform support

Feedback and contributions (even small ones) are very welcome.