LookUp

Grab any text on your screen — like a screenshot, but you get the text.

Press a hotkey, drag a box over anything on screen (a picture, a PDF, a video, an error dialog you can't select), and the recognized text lands straight in your clipboard. No cloud, no upload — recognition runs locally on Windows.

English · Русский

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Why

You can screenshot anything with Win + Shift + S, but then you're stuck with a picture. Text inside images, scanned PDFs, videos, or apps that block copying can't be selected. LookUp keeps that exact "select a region" flow — only instead of an image, you get the text, ready to paste.

Features

• 🖱️ Snip-to-text — the familiar drag-a-rectangle capture, across all monitors.
• ⚡ Fast & local — uses the OCR engine built into Windows 10/11. Nothing is sent anywhere; no API keys, no accounts.
• 🌍 Multi-language — recognizes any language you've installed OCR for (English, Russian, …). Switch in one click from the tray.
• 🪶 Lightweight — a single tray app. One global hotkey, out of your way.
• 📋 Straight to clipboard — capture, then Ctrl + V wherever you need it.
• 🔁 Run at startup — optional, toggled from the tray menu.

Download

1. Go to the Releases page.
2. Download LookUp-win-x64.zip (self-contained — no .NET install required).
3. Unzip anywhere and run LookUp.exe. A small icon appears in the system tray.

About the SmartScreen warning

Because LookUp is a new app that isn't code-signed yet, Windows SmartScreen may show "Windows protected your PC" the first time you run it. That's expected for any small independent tool — click More info → Run anyway.

You don't have to take that on faith:

• The full source is in this repo, and you can build the exact same binary yourself (see Build from source).

• It runs fully offline — no network calls, no accounts.

• Every release ships a SHA256SUMS.txt. Confirm your download matches it:

  Get-FileHash .\LookUp.exe -Algorithm SHA256

Usage

Action	How
Capture text	Press Win + Shift + D, then drag a box over the text.
Cancel a capture	Esc or right-click while selecting.
Capture (no hotkey)	Double-click the tray icon.
Change OCR language	Tray menu → OCR language.
Run at startup	Tray menu → Run at Windows startup.
Quit	Tray menu → Quit LookUp.

The default hotkey is Win + Shift + D — the same gesture as Windows' built-in Win + Shift + S screenshot tool, but the region comes back as text instead of an image. If another app already owns the combo, LookUp falls back to double-clicking the tray icon and you can set a different Hotkey in settings.

First-time OCR note

Windows recognizes one language per capture. In Auto mode LookUp reads each capture in the script of your active keyboard layout — so with the English layout on, text made of letters shared by both alphabets (like CAT / САТ) is read as Latin; switch to the Russian layout and the same shapes are read as Cyrillic. Digits are identical either way. To lock one language regardless of layout, pick it in the tray menu → OCR language. (Auto falls back to your Windows display language if the current layout has no OCR recognizer installed.)

To add a language pack: Windows Settings → Time & Language → Language & region → (your language) → Language options → Optical character recognition.

Settings

Editable JSON at %APPDATA%\LookUp\settings.json (tray menu → Edit settings…):

{
  "Hotkey": "Win+Shift+D",
  "Language": "",
  "KeepLineBreaks": true
}

• Hotkey — any combo of Ctrl / Alt / Shift / Win plus a key, e.g. Ctrl+Shift+2 or Alt+Q.
• Language — a BCP-47 tag like en or ru to pin one language. Empty = Auto (follow the active keyboard layout).
• KeepLineBreaks — keep line breaks (true) or join everything into one line (false).

Build from source

Requires the .NET SDK 9 on Windows 10/11.

git clone https://github.com/DenisDrobyshev/LookUp.git
cd LookUp
dotnet run --project src/LookUp/LookUp.csproj

Produce the same self-contained single file the releases ship:

dotnet publish src/LookUp/LookUp.csproj -c Release -r win-x64 ^
  --self-contained true -p:PublishSingleFile=true ^
  -p:IncludeNativeLibrariesForSelfExtract=true -p:EnableCompressionInSingleFile=true

Sanity-check the OCR pipeline headlessly:

LookUp.exe --selftest
# writes result to %TEMP%\lookup-selftest.txt

How it works

LookUp freezes the screen, lets you pick a region, crops that area, and runs it through Windows.Media.Ocr — the on-device OCR engine shipped with Windows. That's why it's small and quick and needs no bundled model data: it reuses the language packs Windows already has. The OCR backend sits behind a small IOcrEngine interface, so other engines can slot in later.

Roadmap

• Cross-platform builds (macOS / Linux) via a Tesseract backend behind the same IOcrEngine interface.
• "Keep last N captures" history.
• Optional: paste recognized text directly instead of only copying.
• In-app hotkey picker (no need to edit the JSON).
• Per-monitor-DPI capture for pixel-perfect grabs on mixed-DPI setups.

Ideas and issues welcome.

License

MIT © Denis Drobyshev