OCR

Grab text straight from the screen: select a region (or take a whole output), run it through tesseract, and get the recognized text on your clipboard with a notification preview.

Plugin

Field	Value
ID	fel/ocr
Entries	Bar widget: ocr; control-center shortcut: grab

Requirements

Install on PATH:

• grim — Wayland screenshot utility
• slurp — region selection
• tesseract — OCR engine, plus a tessdata language package for every language you enable (e.g. tesseract-data-eng)

A Wayland compositor supported by grim is required. If any dependency is missing, the bar widget greys out and the shortcut tile is disabled.

Usage

Add the OCR widget from the bar's Add-widget picker:

• Left click — select a screen region with slurp; its text is OCR'd and copied to the clipboard.
• Right click — same, but for the entire focused output (no selection).

Optionally add the OCR text grab quick tile under Settings → Control Center → Shortcuts; it mirrors the widget's left/right click mapping.

While a capture runs, the widget highlights until the result (or an error notification) arrives.

Settings

Plugin-level settings live under Settings → Plugins → OCR; both entries share them.

Setting	Type	Default	Description
Tesseract languages	string	eng	Language codes passed to tesseract -l, joined with + (e.g. eng+deu). Each code needs its tessdata package installed.
Page segmentation	select	Uniform block	The tesseract --psm mode: Automatic (3), Uniform block of text (6), or Single line (7).
Copy result to clipboard	bool	on	Copy the recognized text as text/plain.
Show result notification	bool	on	Notify with a preview of the recognized text.

Each widget instance also has:

Setting	Type	Default	Description
Glyph	glyph	scan	Bar icon for this instance.

Notes

• No network access.
• Processes spawned per capture: one /bin/sh pipeline running mktemp, slurp, grim, tesseract and rm.
• Filesystem writes: a single temporary PNG in $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR (falling back to /tmp), deleted immediately after recognition, success or failure. Nothing else is written or read.
• A cancelled selection (Esc in slurp) is silent by design.
• The capture must finish within 60 s (the runtime's subprocess timeout cap) — that includes the time you take to drag the selection.