TextSniper for Linux

A simple, yet effective alternative to TextSniper for macOS — now for Linux (GNOME Wayland).

Uses Flameshot for interactive region selection, Tesseract OCR for text extraction, and wl-clipboard to put the result on your clipboard.

Requirements

• Linux with GNOME on Wayland (tested on Ubuntu 26.04, GNOME Shell 50)
• Flameshot — region screenshot
• Tesseract OCR — text recognition
• wl-clipboard — Wayland clipboard (wl-copy)
• Python 3 with PyGObject and AyatanaAppIndicator3 — tray icon

sudo apt install flameshot tesseract-ocr wl-clipboard gir1.2-ayatanaappindicator3-0.1 python3-gi

How to use it?

Automatic install

git clone https://github.com/m-faizan-tariq/textsniper-linux.git
cd textsniper-linux
chmod +x install.sh
./install.sh

Manual setup

1. Copy the scripts to ~/.local/bin/:

   cp textsnip.sh ~/.local/bin/textsnip
   cp textsnip-tray ~/.local/bin/textsnip-tray
   chmod +x ~/.local/bin/textsnip ~/.local/bin/textsnip-tray

2. Add desktop entries:

   cp textsnip.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/
   cp textsnip-tray.desktop ~/.config/autostart/

3. Bind a keyboard shortcut (e.g. Win+Shift+T):

   gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys.custom-keybinding:\
     /org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/media-keys/custom-keybindings/custom0/\
     name 'TextSniper'
   gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys.custom-keybinding:\
     /org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/media-keys/custom-keybindings/custom0/\
     command 'textsnip'
   gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys.custom-keybinding:\
     /org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/media-keys/custom-keybindings/custom0/\
     binding '<Super><Shift>T'

4. Start the tray icon to access OCR from your system tray:

   textsnip-tray

5. Configure Flameshot to hide the help overlay:

   mkdir -p ~/.config/flameshot
   cat > ~/.config/flameshot/flameshot.ini << 'EOF'
   [General]
   showHelp=false
   EOF
   

How it works

textsnip ──> flameshot gui -s -r ──> PNG (stdout)
                 │
                 ▼
          tesseract stdin stdout ──> plain text
                 │
                 ▼
              wl-copy ──> system clipboard

Files

File	Purpose
textsnip.sh	Main OCR pipeline script
textsnip-tray	System tray icon (Python/Gtk)
textsnip.desktop	Application launcher entry
textsnip-tray.desktop	Autostart entry
install.sh	One-command installer

Notes

• The Flameshot dimensions overlay cannot be hidden and will briefly appear on each capture.
• This project was built for GNOME Wayland. X11 users may need xclip instead of wl-copy.
• AI-generated.

License

Apache-2.0