Skip to content

RustyLens

Lightweight OCR for the Linux desktop.  ·  v0.2.1

Open an image or capture a screenshot, and RustyLens extracts the text using Tesseract — with bounding-box overlays and drag-to-select word copying.

Built with Rust, GTK4, and libadwaita.

Version License CI Downloads

Screenshots

RustyLens main window — bounding-box OCR overlay

RustyLens screenshot mode — XDG portal capture

Demo

Features

  • OCR text extraction — supports 100+ languages via Tesseract; auto-detects all installed language packs
  • Human-readable language selector — dropdown shows full language names ("English", "Japanese", "Chinese (Simplified)") instead of raw codes
  • Drag-to-select — click or drag across highlighted words to select them, then ++ctrl+c++ to copy
  • Bounding-box overlay — recognised words are highlighted directly on the image preview
  • Screenshot mode — rustylens --capture grabs a screenshot via the XDG portal and runs OCR immediately
  • Copy all text — one-click button to copy everything extracted
  • Distro-native binaries — install.sh auto-detects Arch, Ubuntu/Debian, or Fedora and downloads the matching binary, eliminating library ABI mismatches
  • Flatpak-ready — fully sandboxed with portal-based screenshot integration

Install in one line

curl -fsSL https://pranavk-official.github.io/rustylens/install.sh | bash

wget -qO- https://pranavk-official.github.io/rustylens/install.sh | bash

Or download and inspect first:

curl -fsSL https://pranavk-official.github.io/rustylens/install.sh -o install.sh
bash install.sh --minimal

wget -O install.sh https://pranavk-official.github.io/rustylens/install.sh
bash install.sh --minimal

→ See Getting Started for a step-by-step guide, or Installation for all options.