Show HN: X11 tool to share a screen area in any video meeting

I have a big 49" wide screen monitor and sharing my screen in Google Meet was cumbersome because you can only share a window or the whole screen, but not a screen region.

So I wrote a small tool that uses the xrandr extension to mirror an area to a virtual monitor which then can be shared.

See my blog post for some more details: https://www.splitbrain.org/blog/2024-10/11-introducing_clips...

This is very cool and definitely useful when you have a large screen at your disposal. I have a 27" screen which doesn't give you as much screen real-estate as yours. So what I'm using is a script which spawns a separate Xephyr window as DISPLAY 9, and puts a bunch of windows on that screen. https://gist.github.com/radupotop/d77a47767e2e65a7e7d40d1ea8... I use this as my demo environment.

Neat trick. Another, similar one, is possible with "xrandr --setmonitor". That doesn't require starting a separate X server & WM instance:

https://askubuntu.com/q/150066#998435

However, both Xephyr/Xnest and "xrandr --setmonitor" create separate non-overlapping screen(s), which means sharing part of a window (say, browser sans chrome [1]) can't be done here, but is possible with OP's tool.

[1] EDIT: "chrome", as in - parts of browser's window other than webpage itself: tabs, URL bar, bookmarks, etc...