Whiteboard

A distraction-free drawing surface for live screenshare calls (Zoom / Google Meet / Microsoft Teams / etc.).

It is the "open GIMP, make a blank canvas, find the pencil tool, fight with brush settings, then close everything" workflow, replaced with a single blank white window that launches in well under a second. Draw with the mouse while you talk, then hit Esc. Nothing is ever saved.

Built with native egui / eframe (glow/OpenGL backend) — one small native binary, no webview, no Electron, no Node runtime. The release binary is ~7 MB and idles in tens of MB of RAM, which is the whole point: lean and fast to bring up on a call.

Why not Tauri / Electron

The UI is a blank canvas with six color swatches — there is no DOM worth a webview. A webview stack would add a WebKit/Chromium process and a Node build step just to draw lines. Native egui gives faster launch and a far smaller footprint for this exact use case.

Features

• Blank white, borderless, maximized, resizable window (titlebar hidden)
• Freehand drawing with the mouse (drag to draw, click for a dot)
• Six colors: Red, Blue, Black, Green, Purple, Orange
• Infinite canvas with pan and zoom
• Paste a clipboard screenshot/image onto the canvas with Ctrl+V (centered under the cursor)
• Undo with Ctrl+Z (removes the newest line or pasted image first)
• Zero persistence — nothing touches disk
• Esc quits immediately, no "save changes?" prompt

Controls

Action	Input
Draw	Left-drag
Dot	Left-click
Pick color	Click a swatch, or 1–6, or R B K G P O
Paste image	Ctrl + V (clipboard image, centered under the cursor)
Undo last item	Ctrl + Z (press repeatedly, newest line/image first)
Pan	Hold Space + move the mouse
Zoom	Ctrl + mouse wheel (zooms toward the cursor)
Hide / show the on-screen chrome	Tab
Quit	Esc

Color keys map to the palette order: 1/R Red · 2/B Blue · 3/K Black · 4/G Green · 5/P Purple · 6/O Orange.

Tab hides the palette and the hint line so you are left with a completely blank canvas.

Lines and pasted images live in one ordered stack, and paint order is "newest on top". Ctrl+Z removes the most recently added item — a line or an image — working backwards (newest → oldest). There is no separate history buffer; undo peels the single on-screen stack, so it costs no extra memory and needs no 15–20 line threshold. For example: draw two lines, paste an image, draw one more line → Ctrl+Z removes the last line, again removes the image, again the second line, and once more leaves you with a blank canvas. There is intentionally no redo and no save.

Pasting images

Copy a screenshot (e.g. Snipping Tool / GNOME Screenshot / flameshot / maim) and hit Ctrl+V. The image lands with its center under the mouse cursor at its native pixel size, then pans and zooms like everything else — so you can drop a screenshot on the board and annotate it with arrows. Pasted images are undoable like any stroke (see above) and are held on the GPU; undoing frees the texture.

Wayland note: clipboard image read goes through arboard, which is X11-oriented, so under a fully native Wayland session Ctrl+V may come up empty. Run under X11/XWayland (WAYLAND_DISPLAY= whiteboard) if pasting does nothing.

Prerequisites

• A recent stable Rust toolchain (edition 2024; developed on 1.98). Install via rustup if you don't have it.

• Linux: an OpenGL-capable system plus X11/Wayland client libraries (the default glow + x11 + wayland feature set). On a Debian/Ubuntu-based system:

  sudo apt install build-essential pkg-config libgl1-mesa-dev libegl1

  Fedora: sudo dnf install gcc pkgconf mesa-libGL-devel mesa-libEGL-devel. Arch: sudo pacman -S base-devel mesa libglvnd.

  macOS and Windows need no extra system packages (system OpenGL is used).

Build

From the repository root:

# debug (fast to compile, for iterating)
cargo build

# optimized release (this is what you want to actually run)
cargo build --release

The finished binary lands at target/release/whiteboard.

Run it without installing:

cargo run --release
# or
./target/release/whiteboard

Install

The simplest path is Cargo's installer, which drops the binary on your PATH (~/.cargo/bin/whiteboard):

cargo install --path .

Then launch it with:

whiteboard

To uninstall:

cargo uninstall whiteboard

Manual install

Copy the release binary anywhere on your PATH:

sudo install -Dm755 target/release/whiteboard /usr/local/bin/whiteboard

Desktop launcher (Linux, optional)

Drop a .desktop entry so it shows up in your app launcher. Write ~/.local/share/applications/whiteboard.desktop:

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=Whiteboard
Comment=Blank whiteboard for screenshare calls
Exec=whiteboard
Terminal=false
Categories=Utility;

Exec should point at wherever the binary lives (whiteboard if it is on your PATH, otherwise the absolute path).

Troubleshooting

• Blank / black window or GL init error — a graphics driver or missing OpenGL library. Confirm glxinfo/eglinfo report a working GL context and install the Mesa/dev packages from Prerequisites above.
• Ctrl+wheel does nothing — some desktop environments intercept Ctrl+scroll for their own zoom; check mouse/accessibility shortcuts.
• Wayland quirks — the app builds both x11 and wayland. If a Wayland session behaves oddly (window focus, maximization), try an X11/XWayland session.