eSearch is a cross-platform desktop application that turns your screen into a searchable surface: take a screenshot and it can run offline OCR, search the web for the captured text or image, translate on the fly, and pin the capture on top of your other windows. Built with Electron and powered locally by PaddleOCR, it works on Windows, Linux and macOS without sending your screenshots to a cloud service. The project has gathered about 7,300 stars on GitHub and is still actively developed in 2026.
eSearch was inspired by the “screen search” features of phones such as Smartisan’s Big Bang and Xiaomi’s Portal, brought to the desktop and expanded through many iterations. One hotkey opens a capture flow that combines screenshotting, OCR text extraction, web search, translation, image search, scrolling screenshots in any direction, and screen recording in a single tool. Because OCR runs offline with PaddleOCR models bundled locally, text recognition works with no network connection and no privacy trade-offs. Extras such as a color picker, image editing and “paste the picture on the screen” pinning make it a daily-driver utility rather than a single-purpose snipping tool.
eSearch is completely free and open source under the GPL-3.0 license. There are no subscriptions or paid tiers; you download it and run everything locally on your own machine.
eSearch is for students, translators, researchers and office workers who constantly copy text out of images, PDFs and videos, and for Linux users in particular who want a powerful screenshot-plus-OCR workflow that respects privacy by working fully offline.