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Is there a way to search the contents of the current window (like Ctrl+F in a web browser)? I reckon it should be doable, since we also have screenreaders that can access the text content ofwindows, but I can't find anything.

Vincent Guttmann
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  • https://askubuntu.com/questions/280475/how-can-instantaneously-extract-text-from-a-screen-area-using-ocr-tools might be interesting. – Rinzwind May 09 '21 at 12:02
  • I select the whole scrollback buffer, copy, and paste into Emacs. Emacs rules! – waltinator May 09 '21 at 17:06

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This answer may be disappointing, but no, there isn't.

With respect to "doable", yes, it might. It is for sure possible to do OCR - optical character recognition, so one could imagine software that would take a screen shot and recognizes text on the screen. Then, the software should be also able to assess where the text appeared on the screen, in order to be able to highlight the appropriate location when the user searches.

vanadium
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  • The "screen reader" (which can be enabled in GNOME Settings → Accessibility) does read the texts on such windows. So there may be an application that reads and searchs these texts also (with no OCR). – FedKad May 09 '21 at 10:34
  • Perhaps, but I never heard of such application myself. – vanadium May 09 '21 at 10:43
  • This is the best I could find: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/6301/how-do-i-read-from-proc-pid-mem-under-linux – Rinzwind May 09 '21 at 12:15