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2026-08-23 — Screenpipe Desktop Capture

Summary

Built and installed screenpipe from source for passive desktop OCR capture. Binary built in 20 minutes, autostart configured, verified working with two monitors captured via grim on Wayland.

What was done

  1. Rust toolchain installed via rustup (no system Rust available)
  2. Screenpipe cloned to /tmp/screenpipe (depth 1)
  3. Build fix: patched antirez-asr-sys/build.rs — -std=c11 → -std=gnu11 (fixes strdup implicit declaration)
  4. Release binary built: ~/.local/bin/screenpipe (78MB)
  5. Autostart added to autostart.lua: starts 15s after Hyprland login
  6. Verified: health endpoint, grim capture on both 2560x1440 monitors, OCR text extraction, CLI search

Key commands

screenpipe search "query"    # Find text you saw on any screen
screenpipe record --port 3030  # Start capture + API
screenpipe status            # Capture freshness, storage
curl localhost:3030/health   # Health check

Storage

  • ~/.screenpipe/db.sqlite — capture database (~300MB per 8hr session)
  • Privacy: 100% local, no cloud, no account

Files

  • ~/.local/bin/screenpipe — binary
  • ~/.config/hypr/modules/autostart.lua — autostart line
  • /tmp/screenpipe/ — build source (can be cleaned)
  • [[Hyprland Tweaks]] — system tweaks including autostart config