Reverso Linux

A tiny, fast desktop translator for Linux, built on Reverso. It opens a small always-on-top window with the translation, frequency-ranked options, and side-by-side usage examples.

Features

• Persistent source & target language — saved to ~/.config/reverso-linux/config
• Searchable language menu — type to filter by name or code; ↑/↓ and Enter select
• Translation options for short text (1–3 words) with frequency counts
• Usage examples — mixed examples appear immediately when the response provides them; click a chip for option-specific examples
• Full Unicode — Arabic/Hebrew RTL and mixed-direction text, CJK, combining marks
• IME support — composing text is drawn inline and committed through the platform IME
• HiDPI aware, works on both Wayland and X11
• 17 languages: english, russian, ukrainian, french, german, spanish, italian, portuguese, polish, dutch, arabic, hebrew, japanese, turkish, chinese, romanian, swedish

Dependencies

Runtime: Pango, Cairo, Fontconfig, libcurl.

Rendering Arabic, Hebrew or CJK text needs the corresponding system fonts. Most desktop installations already have them; on a minimal system install e.g. noto-fonts noto-fonts-cjk (Arch) or fonts-noto-core fonts-noto-cjk (Debian).

Arch Linux:

sudo pacman -S --needed base-devel rust pango cairo curl

Debian/Ubuntu:

sudo apt install build-essential cargo pkg-config \
  libpango1.0-dev libcairo2-dev libfontconfig1-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev \
  libwayland-dev libxkbcommon-dev libx11-dev libxcb1-dev

Build & Install

cargo build --release
sudo install -Dm755 target/release/reverso-linux /usr/local/bin/reverso-linux

To uninstall:

sudo rm /usr/local/bin/reverso-linux

The version string comes from git describe --tags --match 'v*'. When building from a source tarball, set APP_VERSION:

APP_VERSION=x.y.z cargo build --release

Usage

reverso-linux hello world             # translate arguments
wl-paste -p | reverso-linux           # translate the clipboard
reverso-linux -t french hello world   # set the target language
reverso-linux -h                      # help
reverso-linux -v                      # version

Keyboard and mouse:

• Enter — translate
• Esc — close (or dismiss the language dropdown)
• Ctrl+A / C / V / X — select all, copy, paste, cut
• Open a language menu and type to filter; ↑/↓ moves the highlight, Enter selects, Esc closes
• Click a translation chip to show its examples; click it again to return to the mixed view
• Mouse wheel — scroll the results and examples

If there is no text on stdin and no arguments, the program exits without opening a window (matching the old CLI behaviour).

Hyprland

Add to ~/.config/hypr/hyprland.conf:

bind = SUPER, R, exec, wl-paste -p | reverso-linux

# Keep the popup floating and centered instead of tiling it.
windowrule = float on, match:class ^(reverso-linux)$
windowrule = center on, match:class ^(reverso-linux)$

Press Win+R to translate the current clipboard selection.

Configuration

~/.config/reverso-linux/config (or $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/reverso-linux/config):

target_lang=russian
last_source_lang=english