selsearch 0.1.1

Internet search based on selected text

SelSearch - Internet search based on selected text

SelSearch graps text selected in any application and opens a web browser to search for.

By default, it will search on Google, but you can custimize your search to, for example, look for a DeepL translation of your text (as in the demo below).

Installation

SelSearch can be installed using pip:

pip install selsearch

SelSearch best works with XSel, a program that grabs current selection using X. If XSel is not available on your system, SelSearch will use the clipboard to grab current selection. On Linux, the latter requires a sudo access.

Live Demo

The demo hereunder shows how you can select text, Linux, in a terminal, search for it in Google. Then, search for an English to French translation of some text on DeepL.

Usage

The most basic usage of SelSearch is the following:

selsearch

Optionally, you can specify the place where text is gonna be searched on:

selsearch -w DeepL

You can obtain a list of search urls with:

selsearch -l

Recommended Usage

However, SelSearch is best used when set as a keyboard shortcut. For example, in the demo, selsearch is mapped to <ctrl>+<m> and selsearch -w DeepL to <ctrl>-<n>. How to set up keyboard shortcuts depends on your platform.

Customize

Other functionnalities can be listed with:

selsearch --help

If you desire to change the default search url, or set a custom one, you can set to environment variable SELSEARCH_DEFAULT_SEARCH_URL to any key listed by selsearch -l or any url.

Example in ~/.bashrc:

export SELSEARCH_DEFAULT_SEARCH_URL="https://translate.google.be/?text="

Contributing

Feel free to contribute or propose ideas using the Issues and Pull Request tabs.