QuickSnip
⚡ Lightweight Wayland OCR & Google Lens utility built with Quickshell.
Install / Use
/learn @Ronin-CK/QuickSnipREADME
QuickSnip
A highly optimized screen snipping, OCR, and routing tool built for Quickshell. Designed for speed, flexibility, and minimal friction.
Key Features
- Instant OCR: Fast text extraction using Tesseract.
- Smart Actions: Automatically detects URLs, code blocks, or standard text and routes them to your browser, search engine, or AI sidebar.
- Advanced Selection:
- Granular word highlighting and drag-to-select regions.
Ctrl + Clickto select multiple, non-contiguous words.Shift + Clickto extend a selection range.
- Google Lens: Built-in support for grabbing a region and sending it to Google Lens.
- Quick Translation: Instantly translate text snippets using Google Translate.
- Copy Modes: Switch between standard, raw, and single-line formatting on the fly based on your paste destination.
- Press
dto toggle Direct Copy (skips word selection and copies entire region). - Press
rto toggle Raw Copy (preserves exact OCR formatting). - Press
sto toggle Single Line (strips newlines).
- Press
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 wlrctl wtype
# Get quickshell from AUR
yay -S quickshell
Other Distros
Fedora:
# Enable COPR repository for quickshell
sudo dnf copr enable errornointernet/quickshell
sudo dnf install quickshell grim ImageMagick tesseract tesseract-langpack-eng wl-clipboard curl
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"; }
}
Labwc/LabFyre (rc.xml)
<keyboard>
<keybind key="W-S-t">
<action name="Execute">
<command>quickshell -c QuickSnip -n</command>
</action>
</keybind>
</keyboard>
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
QuickSnip Sidebar Extension 
QuickSnip includes a companion browser extension to handle instant routing into your browser's sidebar.
Install the extension:
- Firefox / Zen Browser: QuickSnip Sidebar
- Manual: Load the
extension/directory as an unpacked extension in your browser.
How to use:
- In
settings.json, ensure"Browser": { "class": "zen" }is set. - Set
"open_in": "sidebar"for your desired actions. - Results will now seamlessly dispatch into your dedicated browser sidebar.
