x-highlight-region

x-highlight-region dims everything but selected regions on the screen. It is meant to be of use when giving presentations or when recording screencasts.

Usage

x-highlight-region may be invoked as specified below. To disengage, press C-Esc.

usage: xhighlight [-h] [--rectangle X Y WIDTH HEIGHT]
                  [--ellipsis X Y WIDTH HEIGHT] [--clear] [--opacity OPACITY]

Highlight regions on the screen.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --rectangle X Y WIDTH HEIGHT, -r X Y WIDTH HEIGHT
                        highlight a rectangular region (may occur multiple
                        times)
  --ellipsis X Y WIDTH HEIGHT, -e X Y WIDTH HEIGHT
                        highlight an ellipsoid region (may occur multiple
                        times)
  --clear, -c           clear everything
  --opacity OPACITY, -o OPACITY
                        opacity of the dim overlay (0 ≤ o ≤ 1), where 1 is
                        perfectly opaque

Regions intended for highlighting can be conveniently selected using slop:

alias xhl='xhighlight -r $(slop -f "%x %y %w %h")'

To conveniently trigger highlighting via a global keyboard-shortcut, please refer to a hotkey daemon such as sxhkd.

Regions can be selected incrementally. When the first invocation has not been disengaged, further calls to xhighlight will add new highlighted regions to earlier ones.

Requirements

x-highlight-region relies on Gtk+ 3, pycairo, pygobject, python-dbus, and python3-keybinder. It can be installed as customary, either by invoking setup.py, or using pip. Since pygobject, python-dbus, and pycairo are not distributed via pypi, these must be installed via your distribution’s package manager.