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+---
+title: "Tips and Tricks for Taking Screenshots and Selecting Text From Images on Sway"
+date: 2021-07-28T18:02:31-04:00
+draft: true
+---
+
+Several days ago I saw someone rant about how there were no good programs for copy text from an image.
+They were using the command line tool [`tesseract`](https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract), but they felt it was too clunky for them.
+They were using `tesseract` by taking a screenshot of the text they were trying to copy, saving the screenshot to a file, and running `tesseract` on that file to generate a *new* file with the text that was found.
+After all that, they would open the final text file, copy the text, and delete the file.
+
+This is something that I actually used to do a lot with my Android phone, before they decided to remove the feature for some reason (or at least move it somewhere that I haven't been able to find for years) so I decided to see how easy it would be to hook up [`grim`](https://wayland.emersion.fr/grim/) and [`slurp`](https://wayland.emersion.fr/slurp/) with `tesseract` to copy text from images the same way.
+
+It turns out, it was not that hard to do:
+
+```
+grim -g "$(slurp)" - | tesseract - - | wl-copy
+```
+
+This works by selecting the region using `"$(slurp)"`, and using `grim -g` to take a screenshot of that region.
+The file is then "saved" to standard output (that's what the `-` represents here).
+`tesseract` is then able to read the image from `-` (standard input, which it gets from the standard output of `grim`), and write the text it finds to - (standard output).
+Finally, we stuff the text that was found using `tesseract` into the clipboard using `wl-copy`, and voilà!
+We now have the text from some image in our clipboard by just drawing a box around it, and we did it with no temporary files on the disk.
+
+However, calling this from the command line each time you want to select text from an image could become cumbersome if it's something you want to do frequently.
+I decided to set this up using a wofi menu, and several options for taking screenshots.
+
+Here is the script that I created:
+
+```
+#!/bin/sh
+
+screenshot_copy_all_displays="Screenshot all displays to clipboard"
+screenshot_all_displays_to_file="Screenshot all displays to file"
+screenshot_copy_area="Screenshot area to clipboard"
+screenshot_copy_area_ocr="Screenshot area to copy text"
+screenshot_area_to_file="Screenshot area to file"
+screenshot_copy_window="Screenshot focused window to clipboard"
+screenshot_window_to_file="Screenshot focused window to file"
+screenshot_copy_monitor="Screenshot focused monitor to clipboard"
+screenshot_monitor_to_file="Screenshot focused monitor to file"
+
+# Store each option in a single string seperated by newlines.
+options="$screenshot_copy_all_displays\n"
+options+="$screenshot_all_displays_to_file\n"
+options+="$screenshot_copy_area\n"
+options+="$screenshot_copy_area_ocr\n"
+options+="$screenshot_area_to_file\n"
+options+="$screenshot_copy_window\n"
+options+="$screenshot_window_to_file\n"
+options+="$screenshot_copy_monitor\n"
+options+="$screenshot_monitor_to_file"
+
+# Prompt the user with wofi.
+choice="$(echo -e "$options" | wofi -d)"
+
+# Make sure that all pictures are saved in the screenshots folder.
+cd ~/Pictures/Screenshots
+
+case $choice in
+    $screenshot_copy_all_displays)
+        grim - | wl-copy
+        ;;
+    $screenshot_all_displays_to_file)
+        grim
+        ;;
+    $screenshot_copy_area)
+        grim -g "$(slurp)" - | wl-copy
+        ;;
+    $screenshot_copy_area_ocr)
+        grim -g "$(slurp)" - | tesseract - - | wl-copy
+        ;;
+    $screenshot_area_to_file)
+        grim -g "$(slurp)"
+        ;;
+    $screenshot_copy_window)
+        grim -g "$(swaymsg -t get_tree | jq -j '.. | select(.type?) | select(.focused).rect | "\(.x),\(.y) \(.width)x\(.height)"')" - | wl-copy
+        ;;
+    $screenshot_window_to_file)
+        grim -g "$(swaymsg -t get_tree | jq -j '.. | select(.type?) | select(.focused).rect | "\(.x),\(.y) \(.width)x\(.height)"')"
+        ;;
+    $screenshot_copy_monitor)
+        grim -o $(swaymsg -t get_outputs | jq -r '.[] | select(.focused) | .name') - | wl-copy
+        ;;
+    $screenshot_monitor_to_file)
+        grim -o $(swaymsg -t get_outputs | jq -r '.[] | select(.focused) | .name')
+        ;;
+esac
+```
+*This script does assume that the file ~/Pictures/Screenshots exists.*
+*Make sure that folder either exists, or modify the script to save the file in a different folder*
+
+This script has a bunch of options that I find useful.
+You can either choose to save the screenshot to a file, or to the clipboard.
+You can choose whether to screenshot a region, the focused window, the focused monitor, or all monitors.
+These could of course all be bound to different shortcuts, but I personally like having a single screenshot button for simplicity.
+
+Speaking of binding shortcuts, lets go over making this script into a shortcut on Sway.
+I recommend you save this script to a file in your path.
+I personally have this saved to `~/.local/bin/screenshot-menu.sh`.
+Remember to mark the script as executable using `chmod +x`.
+
+Make sure to check that the script works properly for you by running the script from the command line.
+In my case, I can open a new terminal and type `screenshot-menu.sh` and the wofi menu will appear.
+
+If that's working fine, you can now add a binding to your sway config to run the script.
+Add a new line to your config (mine is located at `~/.config/sway/config`), for the new binding.
+It should look something like:
+
+```
+    bindsym $meh+a exec screenshot-menu.sh
+```
+
+The `$meh` key is a special modifier on my keyboard; you should use something that makes sense for you.
+
+Happy screenshotting!