Receive highlighted text coordinates on the screen

[kqvanity]

I'm building an app that relies on the coordinates of highlighted text on the desktop.
The workflow would go like

• Double click a word
• word/line highlighted
• events gets fired with metadata that includes the coordinates of selected text
• I would hookup my program to that event as a callback, and the program would attempt to position itself as a window on screen using the coordinates it received as parameters

Is that doable?

[fufexan]

It would need to be a plugin (because only the compositor can access clients' data), and you would need some kind of IPC with the browser to know when text is selected. I don't think I've seen this anywhere so it might get pretty complicated.

[kqvanity]

What's a good place to start with plugin development? (exclusively for this usecase)

[fufexan]

https://wiki.hyprland.org/Plugins/Development/Getting-Started/

[vaxerski]

isn't this info exposed by some apps via dbus? I have a feeling I've heard about that in some phone-related discussion

[vaxerski]

generally the compositor (hyprland) doesn't know about stuff like "text selection" as that is down to the app.

We only know about text input (because it's used by IMEs) via text-input v1/v3.

[kqvanity]

https://wiki.hyprland.org/Plugins/Development/Getting-Started/

Thanks. If any code snippets/ relevant blocks at hyprland codebase, please reference them as well, as I'm a complete foreigner to C++ and graphics dev.

isn't this info exposed by some apps via dbus?

I have no idea at which abstraction layer it's accessible. But if it's readily available via a universal solution on *nix systems, that would stellar.

I have a feeling I've heard about that in some phone-related discussion

It's fairly trivial on Android. There's a ready-made API.