Screeny

A cross-platform GIF recording and editing application built with Tauri, SvelteKit, and Rust.

IMPORTANT

Important

Unlike all of my other repositories, this is an AI-first experiment where I will try to stay as far as away from the code as I can. The goal is improve my agent-based workflows and learn more about AI-first software engineering.

Note

The application in this repository is incomplete and under active development.

Features

• Minimalist GIF editor with a canvas, tool bar, timeline, inspector panel
• GIF playback
• Zoom in/out, move GIF around
• Basic frame management: delete/move, dedupe, change frame duration, duplicate (all available as individual and bulk operations)
• Thoughtful various mouse/key bindings

Key bindings

• Ctrl + Mouse wheel - Zoom in/out
• Shift + Mouse wheel - Scroll timeline
• Left/Right - Move selected frame
• Shift + Left/Right - Expand/reduce frame selection
• Ctrl + A - Select all frames
• Delete - Remove selected frame(s)
• Space - Start/stop playback
• Tab - Select next UI element
• Shift + Tab - Select previous UI element
• Enter - "Click" selected UI element

How to develop

Using Nix Flakes, JetBrains RustRover & Direnv

You can run this project in any way you like, but I have set things up to make it easy to develop using JetBrains RustRover. For this, you'll need:

• direnv
• Any Direnv integration plugin e.g. https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/15285-direnv-integration
• nix

This way, you'll just need to direnv allow in the project directory after which all prerequisites (incl. Rust, Cargo, all Bevy dependencies, etc.) will be available to you. The JetBrains plugin will ensure that the environment is available to your IDE and you can run the project from there (vs cargo build and cargo run in the terminal).

How to deal with RustRover making problems again

RustRover will always fail to sync the project when you open it because it doesn't wait for direnv. Just re-sync immediately after the failure and it will work.

Did RustRover forget where the Rust standard library is again? Run the below and update the path in the settings:

find /nix/store -type d -name rust_lib_src

Running out of disk space?

cargo sweep is your friend and comes with the Flake. For example, the below will delete all build artefacts that are older than 7 days:

cargo sweep -t 7

To clean everything except for the latest build:

cargo sweep --stamp

<Insert any number of cargo build, cargo test, etc. commands>

cargo sweep --file

Using the Nix flake

Upgrade the flake by running nix flake update --flake . in the repository's base directory.

Running tests

Unit tests

Frontend unit tests using Vitest:

pnpm test:unit

E2E tests

Full-stack end-to-end tests that exercise the Svelte UI, Tauri IPC boundary, and Rust backend together using WebDriver.

Prerequisites

1. Build the Tauri app (E2E tests run against the release binary):

   pnpm tauri build

   Note: on some Linux setups the AppImage bundling step may fail — the release binary at src-tauri/target/release/screeny is still produced and is all the E2E harness needs.

2. Install tauri-driver:

   cargo install tauri-driver

3. WebKitWebDriver must be available on PATH. On most Linux distributions this is provided by the webkit2gtk or webkit2gtk-driver package. Check:

   which WebKitWebDriver

4. Display / session: the tests launch a real GUI window, so a running display server is required. On Wayland compositors (e.g. Hyprland) the current session works. In headless CI, use a virtual framebuffer:

   # Example with weston
   weston --backend=headless &
   export WAYLAND_DISPLAY=wayland-0

5. Test fixture: tests/fixtures/test.gif must exist. It is checked into the repo. To regenerate:

   cargo test --manifest-path src-tauri/Cargo.toml --test generate_fixture -- --ignored

Running

pnpm test:e2e

This launches tauri-driver → WebKitWebDriver → the Screeny release binary with SCREENY_E2E=1, then runs 13 scenarios covering app launch, GIF open, frame selection, frame deletion, and export.

E2E mode

When SCREENY_E2E=1 is set, the app exposes deterministic Tauri commands (e2e_open_fixture, e2e_save_path) that bypass native file dialogs, using fixture/temp paths instead. This keeps tests reliable without platform dialog automation.

Environment variable overrides:

• SCREENY_E2E_FIXTURE — custom path to the input GIF fixture
• SCREENY_E2E_EXPORT — custom path for export output (defaults to /tmp/screeny-e2e/export.gif)

Known limitations

• macOS: tauri-driver does not support macOS. E2E tests are Linux and Windows only.
• Windows: not yet tested or set up. tauri-driver supports Windows via the Edge WebDriver, but the wdio config and prerequisites need adapting.
• WebKitWebDriver click interactability: some elements require JavaScript-based clicks ( browser.execute(el => el.click(), element)) because WebKitWebDriver rejects standard WebDriver clicks on certain toolbar buttons despite them being visible and enabled.
• wdio v9 / @wdio/tauri-service: the official Tauri wdio service requires wdio v8 and is incompatible with v9. The harness manages tauri-driver lifecycle manually via beforeSession/afterSession hooks.