wlcrosshairctl

Show, hide, and reload a Wayland crosshair overlay

TLDR

Start the overlay daemon (it stays hidden until you show it)

$ wlcrosshair

Show the crosshair

$ wlcrosshairctl show

Hide the crosshair

$ wlcrosshairctl hide

Toggle visibility

$ wlcrosshairctl toggle

Reread `~/.config/wlcrosshair/config.toml`

$ wlcrosshairctl reload

Stop the daemon

$ wlcrosshairctl quit

SYNOPSIS

wlcrosshairctl show | hide | toggle | reload | quit

wlcrosshairctl talks to the wlcrosshair daemon, which draws an image on a Wayland layer-shell surface. The image is not a pointer and does not take clicks. A build produces one executable, wlcrosshair, and a wlcrosshairctl symlink. The program chooses daemon or client behavior from the name it was started with.The daemon does nothing useful until `~/.config/wlcrosshair/config.toml` exists and names a PNG. On startup the crosshair is hidden. Show it with show or toggle. After you edit the file, reload applies the new image, size, output, and opacity.Any compositor that implements wlr-layer-shell can host the overlay, including Hyprland, Sway and other wlroots compositors, COSMIC, niri, and KDE Plasma on Wayland. GNOME does not implement that protocol. The overlay does not run on X11.

PARAMETERS

show

Make the overlay visible

hide

Hide the overlay. The daemon keeps running

toggle

Switch between shown and hidden

reload

Read the configuration file again without restarting the daemon

quit

Stop the wlcrosshair process

CONFIGURATION

~/.config/wlcrosshair/config.toml

path (required) is the crosshair PNG. output selects a monitor by name (for example `DP-2` or `eDP-1`). With no output, the only connected display is used, or, when several are connected, the name that sorts first. size sets both width and height in pixels and wins over width and height. An omitted dimension uses the PNG's own size. opacity is from 0.0 to 1.0 and multiplies the image alpha. The default is 1.0.

Output names come from the compositor (`hyprctl monitors`, `swaymsg -t get_outputs`, and the equivalents on Plasma, COSMIC, and niri). They can change when you move a cable or a dock.

CAVEATS

wlcrosshair must already be running. The control commands do not start it. Start it from the compositor's autostart or a user service.The config path uses a directory name with no extra suffix. If path is missing, or the PNG cannot be read, the daemon has nothing to draw. reload does not create the file.GNOME and X11 sessions are unsupported.

HISTORY

wlcrosshair is a MIT-licensed Wayland overlay by marzeq. The author treats the feature set as complete. The control client is the same binary, invoked through the wlcrosshairctl name.

RESOURCES

Source code · Homepage