SnapThing

:warn: This tool was developed for personal use and currently has only been tested on linux -- it can be made to work on mac and windows with some tinkering. If you'd like to try the tool on mac or windows, please open an issue! Contributors are also welcome!

A tool for taking screenshots. A transparent window will open at your mouse cursor, from there you can re-size the window and move it around by dragging. Once placed over the desired area, press Enter/Return to capture a screenshot to the clipboard.

Usage

Set a global keybinding for the CLI command snapthing using your preferred tool, or simply run snapthing from the terminal.

Keybindings

Keyboard Shortcuts

Installation

pip install snapthing

OCR - Optical Character Recognition

snapthing also supports using OCR to extract text from the selected area (using tesseract). Press c while the screenshot window is open to copy the extracted OCR text to the clipboard. This feature requires that you have tesseract installed on your system path, as well as the required data package for your language. See the tesseract docs for installation instructions. Without tesseract installed the OCR feature will be unavailible.

Clipboard Access

snapthing uses external programs installed on your system path to interact with the system clipboard. On linux systems, xclip will need to be installed in order for snapthing to work. When mac and windows support is added, they will use the specific programs availible for cliboard interaction.

Linux

On Linux, snapthing will use xclip to interact with the clipboard. Since installation instructions will vary per distribution, it's easiest just to do a search for "install xclip on " to find instructions specific to your distro.

Debian/Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install xclip

Arch/Manjaro

sudo pacman -S xclip