Boomerang is a screenshot zooming and highlighting tool heavily inspired by Boomer, a tool written by youtuber and livestreamer Tsoding for highlighting parts of his screen during coding demonstrations.

Boomer is reliant on X11 however, which is going the way of the Dodo, so the goal with Boomerang is to reimplement a Boomer-like tool for Wayland based desktops. My primary support targets are Sway and Gnome, but it should also work on any system that supports the XDG Desktop Portal specification for screenshots and I am happy to merge patches to improve support for other Wayland based desktop environments.

It is a non-goal of Boomerang to explicitly support X11 based desktop environments -- in those cases, you should continue to use Tsoding's Boomer tool.

Building

Boomerang is built with the Meson build system:

$ meson setup build
$ meson compile -C build

Meson is also able to install Boomerang into your system:

$ sudo meson install -C build

Gnome users should log out and back in order to activate the Gnome Shell extension.

Translating

Adding a New Translation

Re-generate the po/boomerang.pot file for the current code:

$ meson compile -C build boomerang-pot

To add a new translation, add a new <locale>.po file where <locale> is a valid short locale code (e.g. "pt" for Portuguese) or sub-locale code (e.g. "pt_BR" for Brazilian Portuguese):

$ cd po
$ msginit --locale=<locale> --input=boomerang.pot

Open the <locale>.po file with your favourite editor and add your translation in the msgstr fields. Do not replace the original text in the msgid fields:

#: hello:1
msgid "Hello, world!"
msgstr "Olá, mundo!"

Don't forget to add the new locale to the LINGUAS file.

Updating an Existing Translation

Re-generate the po/boomerang.pot file for the current code:

$ meson compile -C build boomerang-pot

To update a translation file with any new changes from the boomerang.pot file:

$ cd po
$ msgmerge --update <locale>.po boomerang.pot

This will add any new message IDs that need translating and attempt to match any changed message IDs with existing translations. Be sure to review translations marked as fuzzy and remove the fuzzy markers. You can check the progress of your translation by running:

$ msgfmt --check --verbose <locale>.po

New translations and translation updates are welcomed as pull requests.

License

Boomerang is made available under the GNU General Public License Version 3. The Boomerang logo and icons are based on the boomerang emoji character from the Google Noto Emoji font, and used here in accordance with the SIL Open Font Licence.