QuickSnip

A Wayland utility for OCR and Google Lens search, built using Quickshell. It is compositor-agnostic and works on any wlroots-based compositor (Hyprland, Sway, River, Niri, MangoWC, etc.). It's meant to be fast, minimal, and stay out of your way.

What it does

• OCR: Select a region to extract text using Tesseract. It includes a cleanup script to fix the awkward line breaks and spacing that Tesseract usually spits out.
• Google Lens: Uploads a cropped JPEG directly to Lens using a form injection hack. This avoids using third-party image hosts and is significantly faster.
• Selection UI: Uses fragment shaders for background dimming and spring physics for the selection box. You get precisison crosshairs while hovering and fluid animations while dragging.
• Low Overhead: This isn't a daemon. The process only spawns when you trigger the keybind, performs the capture/OCR, and kills itself immediately after.
• Compositor Support: Works on any compositor that supports wlr-layer-shell and wlr-screencopy (standard wlroots protocols). This includes Hyprland, Sway, River, Niri, MangoWC, and others.

Demo

recording_20260207_025216.webm

Shortcuts

• Tab: Toggle modes (OCR / Lens)
• t: Switch to OCR
• g: Switch to Lens
• Escape: Quit (cleans up temp files)

Setup

QuickSnip works on any Linux distribution. You just need the following dependencies in your path:

• quickshell
• grim
• imagemagick
• tesseract + tesseract-data-eng
• wl-clipboard
• curl
• libnotify

Installation (Arch)

AUR (maintained by @knownasnaffy):

yay -S quicksnip-git

Manual Installation

sudo pacman -S grim imagemagick tesseract tesseract-data-eng wl-clipboard curl libnotify xdg-utils
# Get quickshell from AUR
yay -S quickshell

Other Distros

Fedora:

# Enable COP repository for quickshell
sudo dnf copr enable errornointernet/quickshell
sudo dnf install quickshell grim ImageMagick tesseract tesseract-langpack-eng wl-clipboard curl libnotify xdg-utils

For other distros, install the equivalent packages using your package manager (e.g., apt, zypper). For quickshell, follow the official build instructions if it's not in your repos.

Clone it into your config:

mkdir -p ~/.config/quickshell 
git clone https://github.com/Ronin-CK/QuickSnip.git ~/.config/quickshell/QuickSnip

Configuration

Add a keybinding to your compositor config to launch the tool.

Hyprland (hyprland.conf)

bind = $mainMod SHIFT, T, exec, quickshell -c QuickSnip -n

Sway (config)

bindsym $mod+Shift+t exec quickshell -c QuickSnip -n

Niri (config.kdl)

binds {
    Mod+Shift+T { spawn "quickshell" "-c" "QuickSnip" "-n"; }
}

Note on Scaling: If the selection area looks shifted or wrong, it's probably Qt scaling fighting with the compositor. You can force it to 1 like this:

# Hyprland example
bind = $mainMod SHIFT, T, exec, env QT_SCALE_FACTOR=1 QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR=0 quickshell -c QuickSnip -n