browser window popup

a basic unpublished example of a Windows native Firefox extension to quickly open Google Translate with a selected text in a popup window from anywhere on the system . you can select any text and press ctlr+c+c , on which a browser popup window will open with the translation of the selected text .

made just for fun and learning . i low key wanted to have something like this polished and published , but i did not have resources to make it serious project out of it . so only showing how it could be aproached for anyone interested .

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why

the problem is that any other free and/or open-source solutions for quick translator/dictionary/wikis/search/etc popup-ing could only do the following :

• open a popup with custom GUI for existing online or offline services , e.g. GoldenDict and alternatives .
• open a full tab in your browser , e.g. SnipDo and alternatives .
• work only inside of a browser .

how

since a browser extension alone has no access to what a user selects on other apps , i use native messaging stack . the extension spawns the application that runs in the background . the app waits for the key sequence and sends a message with a text and cursor position data to the extension .

limitations

• the application uses Windows clipboard to copy a selected text with the first c while ctrl is held . so , not to overcomplicate , ctrl+c+c is hardcoded and not configurable yet . the clipboard method is the most reliable way to actually get the selected text from other applications as many do not expose to the OS what you select , e.g. browsers . as a bonus , this solution works nice with OCR tools like NormCap which recognise text from an area-screenshot and copy it to the clipboard anyway .
• the browser must already be open . i don't like this , but it's the nature of the extensions .

setup and usage

1. build a C++ application with CMake . i used CLion and MinQW toolchain . no libs required except from Windows API which should be installed by default .
2. run a registry update script with PowerShell . this is needed for Firefox to find the application .
3. add an extension to your Firefox as a temporary addon . how to : Mozilla docs .