txtpik

txtpik is a simple command-line text picker tool for Linux that uses Tesseract OCR to extract text.

Installation

Prerequisites

For X11:

maim tesseract-ocr-eng

For Wayland:

grim slurp tesseract-ocr-eng

Clone the repository and run:

git clone https://github.com/6z7y/txtpik.git
cd txtpik
make install

To uninstall:

make uninstall

Usage

txtpik

Then click and drag to select the text you want to extract.

Optional — Copy to Clipboard

You can pipe the output to a clipboard tool:

wayland: txtpik | wl-copy

x11: txtpik | xclip -selection clipboard

How it works

1. Select area → Click and drag to choose text on screen
2. Take screenshot → Captures selected region
3. Run OCR → Tesseract extracts text from image
4. Print text → Shows result in terminal
5. Clean up → Deletes temporary screenshot

Tools used

Wayland:

• slurp - Screen region selector
• grim - Screenshot tool

X11:

• maim - Screenshot tool with built-in selection

OCR:

• tesseract-ocr - Converts images to text
• tesseract-ocr-eng - English language support
• tesseract-ocr-[lang] - Add other languages (ara, spa, fra, etc.)