oshot

A simple and lightweight tool for extracting and translating text from a screenshot/image (on the fly)

Dependencies

Linux

Package names may vary by distribution and package manager.
If a package is not found, try searching by its base name (e.g., libglfw3-dev → glfw).

• libx11-dev
• grim (Wayland only)
• libglfw3-dev
• libtesseract (including necessary language models, e.g tesseract-ocr-eng)
• libzar-dev
• Python and pip
  • Python packages:

    pip install --user pillow pystray pyclip pyperclipimg

  • From Arch Linux and based:

    yay -S python-pillow python-pystray python-pyclip python-pyperclipimg
    

Windows

1. Install Python from the Microsoft Store or python.org.
   Note: Make sure to check the "Add Python to PATH" option during installation.

2. Install pip by running the following commands in CMD:

   curl https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py -o get-pip.py
   python get-pip.py

3. Install Python packages:

   pip install pillow pystray pyclip pyperclipimg

4. Download the required language data for Tesseract from tessdata.

5. Extract the language files to a directory of your choice.

6. Configure the Tesseract and language data paths in the config.toml file (see Windows Configuration section for more details).

Building

Make

$ git clone https://github.com/Toni500github/oshot/
$ cd oshot/
$ make
# You can move it in a custom directory in your $PATH (preferably in the home)
$ ./build/release/oshot

CMake (ninja)

$ git clone https://github.com/Toni500github/oshot/
$ cd oshot/
$ mkdir build2 && cd build2
$ cmake .. -G Ninja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
$ ninja
# You can move it in a custom directory in your $PATH (preferably in home)
$ ./oshot

Windows Configuration

After installing Tesseract:

1. Open the %APPDATA% directory (press Win+R and type %APPDATA%)
2. Navigate to the oshot directory
3. Edit config.toml and set the ocr-path variable to your Tesseract data directory
   • Use double backslashes in the path: C:\\Users\\Name\\tessdata Example:

ocr-path = "C:\\Program Files\\Tesseract-OCR\\tessdata"

Troubleshooting

Windows

If when starting oshot, it starts to flick the screen black (or it won't launch), try to follow these steps:

1. Download MesaForWindows-x64-20.1.8.7z
2. Extract the opengl32.dll file into the directory where oshot.exe is located
3. Try to launch it again

Linux

• If when you try to run oshot gives linking library errors, then try to use the AppImage release instead.
• If oshot doesn't take the screenshot, then you need to take the screenshot from an external tool and either pipe into stdin or use the -f /path/to/image flag

If still errors, please open an Issue and take a screenshot/paste the text of the error appearing in the console when executing oshot

Usage

simplescreenrecorder-2025-12-29_20.35.53.mp4