Introducing: clipscreen [splitbrain.org]
Using a ginormous 49" widescreen monitor is awesome. Except for when you wanna share your screen in Google Meet or other tools. Sharing a 5120×1440 screen simply makes no sense. Of course you can opt to share a tab or window instead. But for work, I often need to switch between a terminal, my IDE and a browser. If I want to share my workflow with a colleague, I have to constantly stop and restart sharing.
Zoom has an option to share a portion of the screen. So I wondered if there is a more general way to achieve this. One that works across any sharing tool.
Turns out there is. As this Ask Ubuntu answer explains, you can use xrandr to create a virtual monitor that mirrors part of your screen. You then can share that monitor.
So I looked for a way to display an overlay on X. This Stackoverflow answer gave me a great starting point to implement that.
So I sat down and wrote a small C++ program. Of course I barely remember C++, so being able to just talk to ChatGPT to iterate over my code was great. I'm using Aider for things like this.
