⌖ TextShot

Fork of ianzhao/textshot — extended with a full desktop GUI, system tray, global hotkey, and capture history.

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What's new in this fork

Feature	Original	This fork
CLI screenshot OCR	✅	✅
Dark GUI with capture history	❌	✅
System tray (background mode)	❌	✅
Global hotkey Ctrl+Alt+S	❌	✅
Preview & edit before copying	❌	✅
Windows silent launcher (no console)	❌	✅
Auto-start with Windows	❌	✅

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Screenshots

Draw a rectangle around any text on screen → instantly copied to clipboard.

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Installation

1. Prerequisites

Install Tesseract OCR (required):

• Windows: Download from UB-Mannheim releases and install. Then add C:\...\Tesseract-OCR to your PATH.
• macOS: brew install tesseract
• Linux: sudo apt install tesseract-ocr

2. Clone & install

git clone https://github.com/walter98garciarespaldo-debug/textshot.git
cd textshot
pip install -r requirements.txt

3. Run the GUI

python run_gui.py

On Windows, to run silently without a console window, double-click TextShot.vbs or use the generated desktop shortcut.

4. Setup auto-start (Windows)

Run once to add TextShot to Windows startup and create a desktop shortcut:

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File install_startup.ps1

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Usage

GUI mode (recommended)

python run_gui.py           # English OCR (default)
python run_gui.py spa       # Spanish
python run_gui.py eng+spa   # English + Spanish

Hotkey: Ctrl+Alt+S — works globally from any app (requires running as Administrator on Windows for system-level hotkey capture).

Tray icon: Close the window to minimize to system tray. The app keeps running in the background. Click the tray icon to reopen the history window.

CLI mode (original)

textshot            # one-time capture
textshot eng+fra    # with French fallback
textshot -i 200     # capture every 200ms from a fixed region

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Supported languages

Tesseract supports 100+ languages. Install the corresponding data files and pass the language code:

python run_gui.py spa      # Spanish
python run_gui.py deu      # German
python run_gui.py eng+jpn  # English + Japanese

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Files

File	Description
textshot/gui.py	GUI: tray app, main window, hotkey thread
run_gui.py	Entry point for the GUI
TextShot.vbs	Silent Windows launcher (no console)
install_startup.ps1	One-time setup: autostart + desktop shortcut
textshot/textshot.py	Original CLI logic (unchanged)
textshot/ocr.py	Tesseract OCR wrapper (unchanged)

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Requirements

Python >= 3.10
PyQt5
pytesseract
Pillow
pyperclip
keyboard

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License

MIT — see LICENSE.txt.
Original project by Ian Zhao.