Text Grab

Text Grab

Copy any text you can see.

Overview

Use Text Grab on Windows to capture text with OCR, clean it up quickly, and move it into the next step of your workflow.

When text gets trapped inside images, videos, PDFs, and parts of apps where you cannot select it, Text Grab helps you get it back out. You can take a screenshot or open a supported file, run it through the OCR engine, and send the result to the clipboard or straight into an editor. All OCR runs entirely on your device — no internet connection, no cloud service, and no per-use cost. Everything stays local and private. You can also do much more than copy text from images, because Text Grab gives you multiple modes for capture, post-grab cleanup, spreadsheet-style editing, and fast text reuse.

You can use it all day without friction. Launch it quickly from the taskbar, open specific modes from the command line, or enable the background process so global hotkeys work anywhere in Windows.

The Full-Screen Grab mode is also the basis of the PowerToys Text Extractor (opens in a new tab).

Requirements

• Windows 10 or later — required for all features using the Windows OCR API.
• Windows 11 on a Copilot+ PC (Microsoft Store install) — required for Windows AI features, which use the on-device Neural Processing Unit for higher-accuracy recognition.

How to Install

Official

• Microsoft Store (opens in a new tab)
• GitHub Releases (opens in a new tab)

With Visual Studio 2022 or Visual Studio 2026

• Install Visual Studio (the free Community edition is sufficient).
• Install the "Universal Windows Platform development" workload.
• Install the ".NET desktop development" workload.
• Install the ".NET cross-platform development" workload.
• Install Windows 10 SDK 10.0.22621.0
• Open Text-Grab.sln in Visual Studio.
• Set Text-Grab-Package as the startup project.
• Set the CPU target to x64 or ARM64.
• Press F5 or choose Local Machine.

With the .NET SDK or Visual Studio Code

• Install the .NET 10 SDK: https://dotnet.microsoft.com/download/dotnet/10.0
• This repository pins SDK 10.0.100 in global.json.
• Optional for debugging: install Visual Studio Code https://code.visualstudio.com/ and the C# extension / C# Dev Kit.
• Open the Text-Grab folder in VS Code.
• Restore dependencies with dotnet restore Text-Grab.sln
• Build with dotnet build Text-Grab\Text-Grab.csproj
• Run tests with dotnet test Tests\Tests.csproj