Magnus

A very simple screen magnifier.

Made with 💝 for

A PPA for Magnus is published by Martin Wimpress.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:flexiondotorg/magnus
sudo apt update
sudo apt install magnus

There's also an Ansible deployment by Taha Ahmed at codeberg.

The original code was built around GTK 3, libkeybinder, and legacy GDK screen capture APIs. Current GNOME guidance is GTK 4 plus modern shortcut APIs, and GTK 4 has removed the old root-window capture functions entirely. Magnus now uses:

• PyGObject with Gtk 4
• mss for screen capture
• grim for screen capture on Wayland sessions
• mss for screen capture on X11 sessions
• pynput for pointer access

You'll still need the GTK runtime and typelibs from your distro:

• gir1.2-gdkpixbuf-2.0
• gir1.2-glib-2.0
• gir1.2-gtk-4.0
• grim when running on Wayland
• python3
• python3-gi
• an X11 session or a Wayland compositor with grim support for screen capture

If you want to run Magnus with uv, install the GObject introspection packages from your distro first, then sync the Python dependencies from pyproject.toml:

sudo apt install gir1.2-gdkpixbuf-2.0 gir1.2-glib-2.0 gir1.2-gtk-4.0
uv sync
uv run magnus

Note: GTK 4 no longer has a toolkit-native replacement for libkeybinder style desktop-global shortcuts, and real-time screen magnifiers remain constrained by Wayland security rules. The updated app uses modern GTK application actions for zoom shortcuts and an X11/XWayland-friendly capture path.

To install Magnus into the current Python environment with pip:

python -m pip install .
magnus