Screen Recorder — Dank Material Shell Plugin

Plugin for Dank Material Shell (DMS) that wraps gpu-screen-recorder in a QML UI, letting you start, pause, and stop screen recordings directly from the DankBar. Works on any Wayland compositor.

Requirements

• Dank Material Shell >= 1.2.0
• gpu-screen-recorder installed and in your PATH
• A working XDG Desktop Portal for screencasting (required when Capture source is set to portal)

Note: The Flatpak version of gpu-screen-recorder is a bundled GUI frontend and is not supported. Install the native system package instead.

Installing gpu-screen-recorder

Arch Linux & derivatives

sudo pacman -S gpu-screen-recorder

Other distros

See the official installation guide.

XDG Desktop Portal (for portal capture mode)

If screen recording fails with a portal error, install and configure a portal backend:

# Arch
sudo pacman -S xdg-desktop-portal-gnome

Create or edit ~/.config/xdg-desktop-portal/portals.conf:

[preferred]
default=gnome;gtk

Then restart the portal services:

systemctl --user restart xdg-desktop-portal xdg-desktop-portal-gnome

Installation

# Clone
git clone https://github.com/arqueon/dms-screen-recorder
ln -sf "$(pwd)/dms-screen-recorder" ~/.config/DankMaterialShell/plugins/screenRecorder

# Reload
dms ipc call plugins reload screenRecorder

Then go to DMS Settings → Plugins and enable the plugin on the bar.

Usage

DankBar controls

Action	Result
Left click	Start recording
Left click (while recording)	Show Stop? confirmation — click again to stop and save
Right click or Middle click	Pause / Resume

When you click to stop, the pill turns orange and shows Stop? for 3 seconds. Click again to confirm, or do nothing to cancel and keep recording. This prevents accidentally stopping a recording with a misclick.

IPC commands (keybinds)

The plugin exposes IPC commands you can bind to keyboard shortcuts:

dms ipc call screenRecorder toggleRecording   # start or stop
dms ipc call screenRecorder startRecording
dms ipc call screenRecorder stopRecording
dms ipc call screenRecorder togglePause       # pause or resume

Note: IPC commands bypass the 3-second stop confirmation. toggleRecording stops immediately when a recording is active.

niri (~/.config/niri/config.kdl):

bindings {
    Mod+Alt+R { spawn "dms" "ipc" "call" "screenRecorder" "toggleRecording"; }
    Mod+Alt+P { spawn "dms" "ipc" "call" "screenRecorder" "togglePause"; }
}

Hyprland (hyprland.conf):

bind = SUPER ALT, R, exec, dms ipc call screenRecorder toggleRecording
bind = SUPER ALT, P, exec, dms ipc call screenRecorder togglePause

Sway (~/.config/sway/config):

bindsym $mod+Alt+r exec dms ipc call screenRecorder toggleRecording
bindsym $mod+Alt+p exec dms ipc call screenRecorder togglePause

KDE Plasma (System Settings → Shortcuts → Custom Shortcuts): Set the trigger command to dms ipc call screenRecorder toggleRecording.

Wayfire / COSMIC / any compositor with custom keybind support: Run dms ipc call screenRecorder <method> as the command.

Configuration

Open DMS Settings → Plugins → Screen Recorder:

Option	Description	Default
Frames per second	Recording framerate	60
Video quality	h264 encoding preset	Very high
Record audio	Capture system audio output	On
Record cursor	Include mouse pointer	On
Capture source	portal = choose window/screen on start; screen = first monitor	portal
Recordings folder	Output directory (empty = ~/Videos/Screencasting)	—
Post-record command	Command to run after recording finishes. Use $1 to reference the file path.	—

Post-record command examples

Goal	Setting value
Copy file:// URI to clipboard	wl-copy --type text/uri-list "file://$1"
Open file with dragon-drop	dragon-drop "$1"
Open in mpv	mpv "$1"
Copy raw path to clipboard	wl-copy "$1"
Run a custom script	~/.local/bin/my-script "$1"

The file path is available as $1 and is fully expanded (e.g. ~/Videos/Screencasting/2026-06-13_09-00-00.mp4).

How stopping works

The plugin sends SIGINT to gpu-screen-recorder so it finalises and saves the MP4 correctly, followed by SIGKILL to close any lingering portal window. Do not force-kill the process with SIGKILL directly or the file will be incomplete.

Development

ln -sf "$(pwd)" ~/.config/DankMaterialShell/plugins/screenRecorder
dms ipc call plugins reload screenRecorder
dms ipc call plugins list

License

MIT