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
• libxcb-dev
• libpng-dev
• libglfw3-dev
• libtesseract (including necessary language models, e.g tesseract-ocr-eng)
• libzbar-dev
• libappindicator3-dev
• grim (Wayland only)
• wl-clipboard (Wayland only)

Windows

1. Download the required language data for Tesseract from tessdata.
2. Extract the language files to a directory of your choice.
3. 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 a screen black (or it won't launch), try the following 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 oshot gives linking library errors, when trying to run it, 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