QuickSnip is 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.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- 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.
Website: github.com/Ronin-CK/QuickSnip
Support:
Developer: Ronin-CK
License: MIT License
Related Software
| OCR Tools | |
|---|---|
| OCRmyPDF | Adds an OCR text layer to scanned PDFs using the unpaper utility |
| Paperwork | Simplify the management of your paperwork |
| OCRFeeder | Desktop OCR suite featuring a complete GTK graphical user interface |
| gImageReader | Simple Gtk/Qt front-end to Tesseract |
| gscan2pdf | GUI to produce PDFs or DjVus from scanned documents |
| lios | linux-intelligent-ocr-solution for converting print into text |
| hocr-tools | Manipulate and evaluate hOCR format |
| Skanpage | Simple scanning application optimized for multi-page document scanning |
| GOCR | Reads images in many formats |
| QuickSnip | OCR and Google Lens search |
| ocropy | Open source document analysis and OCR system |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
 Explore our comprehensive directory of recommended free and open source software. Our carefully curated collection spans every major software category.This directory is part of our ongoing series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. It features hundreds of detailed reviews, along with open source alternatives to proprietary solutions from major corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. You’ll also find interesting projects to try, hardware coverage, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. Discovered a useful open source Linux program that we haven’t covered yet? Let us know by completing this form. |