Desktop integrations¶

Dragomand is a service, so "integration" usually means a few lines of glue. Everything below talks to the same daemon: the first use of a pair downloads its model, later uses are offline, and warm models are shared across all of it.

The shell scripts live in the integrations/ directory of the source tree and only need dragomanctl on PATH.

Translate the current selection (global shortcut)¶

integrations/translate-selection.sh [SRC] [TRG] reads the primary selection (using wl-clipboard on Wayland or xclip on X11), translates it and shows the result as a desktop notification.

On KDE Plasma, open System Settings, go to Shortcuts, choose Add Command, and enter for example:

/path/to/translate-selection.sh bg en

Bind it to a key, select any text anywhere, press the key, read the translation in the notification.

Translate the clipboard (Klipper)¶

integrations/translate-clipboard.sh [SRC] [TRG] translates the clipboard contents in place and notifies. In Klipper, open Configure Klipper, go to Actions, choose Add Action and use the script as the command; or bind the script to a shortcut directly.

KRunner¶

The package ships dragoman-krunner, a D-Bus activated KRunner plugin. Press the KRunner shortcut (Alt+Space by default) and type:

tr bg en добро утро

The translation appears as a result; activating it copies the translation to the clipboard. No setup is needed beyond installing the package.

GNOME Shell search¶

dragoman-search-provider does the same for the GNOME Activities overview. Search for:

tr bg en добро утро

or tr some text for the default pair. Activating the result copies the translation. The provider is D-Bus activated and exits when unused, and queries that do not start with tr never reach it.

LibreOffice¶

The extension (.oxt) is developed as its own project, dragoman-libreoffice. From a checkout of it, build and install with:

./build-oxt.sh
unopkg add dist/dragoman-libreoffice.oxt

or add the file through the Extension Manager in the Tools menu.

What you get:

• A Translate submenu in the Tools menu and a Translate toolbar (enable it under View, Toolbars, Translate): translate the selection, choose languages, swap direction.
• In the Tabbed ("ribbon") interface the three commands appear as buttons in the Extension tab.
• A language chooser listing every available language by name, in editable dropdowns, so codes never need typing. The chosen pair is remembered in ~/.config/dragomand/libreoffice.json.
• Rich text support. Selections with links or character formatting are translated as HTML, so hyperlinks stay attached to the translated words and bold or italic runs survive. Plain selections take a faster path. Input is also normalized and cleaned of invisible artifacts that web copies drag along (soft hyphens, zero-width characters, mixed Cyrillic and Latin lookalike letters) before translating.
• Direction that follows the document. "Translate selection" reads the language Writer has set on the selected text (the one the spelling checker uses, set under Format, Character, Language). Text in the saved source language translates normally, text in the saved target language reverses the direction, any other recognized language translates into the saved target, and text without a language uses the saved pair.

The first use of a pair downloads its model, which can take a few seconds; LibreOffice waits meanwhile.

KTextEditor plugin (Kate, KWrite, KDevelop)¶

The dragoman-ktexteditor project is a native plugin for the editor framework behind Kate, KWrite and KDevelop. Unlike the script-based recipes it talks D-Bus directly, shows download progress in the editor and never loses your text: if the document changes while a translation is in flight, the result goes to the clipboard instead of overwriting the edit.

Once enabled (Settings, Configure, Plugins, then check Dragoman Translator), the Tools menu gains:

• Translate Selection (Ctrl+Alt+T): translates with the saved pair; when the selection's script (Cyrillic versus Latin) clearly points the other way, the direction reverses automatically.
• Translate Selection (Choose Languages): pick the pair from what the daemon reports, save it, translate.
• Swap Translation Direction.

Empty lines in the selection are preserved. Selections are capped at the daemon's per-request limits (256 lines, 1 MiB); run bigger jobs through dragomanctl.

Building needs Qt 6, KDE Frameworks 6 and extra-cmake-modules, from a dragoman-ktexteditor checkout:

cmake -S . -B build -G Ninja
cmake --build build
sudo cmake --install build

Distributions should package it separately from the daemon so the daemon package never pulls KDE dependencies.

Kate without compiling anything¶

Any stock Kate can do in-place selection translation through External Tools. Open Settings, Configure Kate, External Tools, choose Add, and enter:

Flatpak applications¶

A sandboxed client needs permission to talk to the daemon:

flatpak override --user --talk-name=dev.l10n_bg.dragomand.Translator1 <app-id>

Application authors add the same --talk-name to their manifest's finish-args instead.

Anything else¶

Any language that can call D-Bus, or simply run dragomanctl, can integrate. A shell one-liner is a working integration:

echo "Добро утро" | dragomanctl translate -f bg -t en

For proper asynchronous clients with progress reporting, see the D-Bus API.