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Getting Started

This guide walks you through installing RustyLens and running it for the first time. You will end up with a working OCR tool on your Linux desktop.

What you need:

  • A Linux desktop (x86_64)
  • curl or wget
  • Root access for installing Tesseract language packs (optional — --download avoids this)

Step 1 — Run the installer

The install.sh script auto-detects your distribution, downloads the correct native binary, and sets up the English Tesseract language pack.

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

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

The installer will:

  1. Detect your distro (Arch, Debian/Ubuntu, Fedora, or fall back to AppImage)
  2. Download the matching binary from GitHub Releases
  3. Install it to ~/.local/bin/rustylens
  4. Install the desktop entry and icon so the app appears in your launcher
  5. Install the English Tesseract language pack via your package manager

Tip

Make sure ~/.local/bin is on your PATH. Most modern distros include it by default. If not, add this to your shell profile: 

export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"

Step 2 — Launch RustyLens

rustylens

Or search for RustyLens in your application launcher (GNOME Shell, KDE Plasma, etc.).

Step 3 — Extract text from an image

  1. Click Open Image in the toolbar.
  2. Select any image file (PNG, JPEG, TIFF, BMP, etc.) from the file chooser.
  3. OCR runs automatically — extracted text appears in the panel below the image.
  4. Highlighted word boxes appear on the image. Click or drag across them to select words, then press ++ctrl+c++ to copy.
  5. Use Copy All Text to copy everything at once.

Step 4 — Try screenshot mode (optional)

RustyLens can also capture a screenshot and run OCR on it directly:

rustylens --capture

An interactive selection overlay appears. Draw a rectangle around the area you want to OCR, and the extracted text appears immediately.

What's next?