The overlay

The overlay draws each scan’s text back over the game, so you can hover a word where it appears on screen instead of in the Log. Look for the faint blue underlines on scanned text.

Kimochi's overlay over a visual novel: each word of the dialogue boxed, the hovered one highlighted, with its dictionary entry above.

Turning it on

Turn on Show overlay in the sidebar (under Auto OCR). The overlay follows the window you read and stays click-through everywhere except over the words themselves, so the game keeps working underneath.

The overlay is marked Experimental (Settings → OCR & Overlay → Overlay mode).

The sidebar's Auto OCR and Show overlay switches.

Looking up words

Hover a word with the dictionary’s scan key held (Shift for Yomitan by default) to open its pop-up. With a controller, open the controller menu and choose Scan or Read along to step through the words with the D-pad. See Looking up words.

Options

Setting	Default	What it does
Group text into regions	Off	Gives nearby text boxes a shared background. Useful for complex layouts.
Filter out furigana and small text	On	Leaves reading aids above kanji out of the overlay and the Log.

Settings, OCR & Overlay, Overlay section with Overlay mode, Group text into regions and Filter out furigana and small text.

Platform notes

macOS: Game Mode throttles the overlay while a full-screen game is in front; Kimochi tells you when it happens. See Install on macOS.
Linux on Wayland: the overlay needs the desktop’s layer-shell support or, on GNOME 46, the GNOME overlay extension. Without them the switch reads Overlay unavailable. See Install on Linux.
Debug overlay (Settings → General → Diagnostics) marks the scanned text boxes over the source and opens the Diagnostics window, to check what the OCR found.