snapocr

A fast, self-contained screen OCR utility for Linux desktops (Wayland and X11).

Select any region on your screen, extract text (English, Arabic, code, symbols) using an optimized in-memory Tesseract pipeline, and copy the result directly to your clipboard with a desktop notification.

Zero external CLI dependencies required (no slurp, no grim).

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Features

• Self-Contained: Native in-memory Wayland screencopy via libwayshot and interactive freeze-frame selector.
• Multi-Monitor Support: Automatically detects and captures the active/focused monitor on multi-display setups (Hyprland and Sway IPC), preventing scaling distortion or window displacement.
• Auto Multi-Language OCR: Detects and extracts Arabic and English text simultaneously (eng+ara) out-of-the-box.
• High-Accuracy OCR Pipeline:
  • 2.5x Catmull-Rom upscaling to match 300 DPI neural OCR requirements.
  • 24px white padding to preserve character connectors and glyph contours.
  • Automatic dark-mode background detection and inversion.
  • Intelligent Page Segmentation Mode (PSM) fallback (PSM 13 for single-line UI titles/snippets, PSM 6 for multiline blocks).
• Clipboard and Alerts: Copies to clipboard (arboard / wl-copy) and delivers a native desktop notification preview (notify-send).
• Nix Flake First-Class Support: Zero-friction build and dev environment with pinned dependencies.

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Usage

# Default: interactive crop on active monitor with automatic language detection (English + Arabic)
snapocr

# Target a specific monitor
snapocr --monitor DP-1
snapocr --monitor 1

# Capture all monitors combined into a single canvas
snapocr --all

# List detected outputs
snapocr --list-monitors

# Force a specific language
snapocr --lang eng
snapocr --lang ara

# Save preprocessed crop to /tmp for debugging
snapocr --debug

# Suppress desktop notification
snapocr --no-notify

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Hyprland / Sway Keybind

Add this to your hyprland.conf:

# OCR region to clipboard
bind = $mainMod SHIFT, S, exec, snapocr

Or in sway/config:

bindsym $mod+Shift+s exec snapocr

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Building and Installation

With Nix Flakes (Recommended)

# Build the standalone wrapped binary
nix build .#

# Run directly
./result/bin/snapocr

# Enter development shell
nix develop

With Cargo

cargo build --release

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License

MIT