Textracto_

Your screen is full of unselectable text. Copy it anyway.

Error dialogs. Screen-shares. Videos. PDFs that are secretly bitmaps. Terminal panes you can't scroll. Textracto reads your screen with on-device OCR and gives you an fzf-style fuzzy finder over every visible line — press ⌥⌘O, type a few characters, hit ↩, and it's on your clipboard.

Download for macOS  ↓ Buy a license — $1.99 Free for your first 250 copies · every feature included · macOS 14+
 terminal — zsh
$ docker compose up -d --build
npm ERR! code ERESOLVE
npm ERR! Could not resolve dependency
$ git rebase --onto main feature~3
 Zoom — Sarah's screen
Q3 Planning
staging: 10.40.2.117
Wi-Fi: Conf_5G · pass: h3llo!42
 Preview — invoice.pdf
Invoice #4471
ACME Design Co.
Total due: $1,204.00
tracking: 1Z999AA10123456784
✓ Copied
    ↩ copy · ⌘↩ copy & stay · esc dismiss
    This one's real — type inv, or err.*dep to grab a whole span, press ↩.
    Why it exists

    If you can see it, you can grep it.

    ⌁

    fzf for your screen

    Type-to-filter with real fuzzy matching — contiguous-run and word-boundary bonuses, ranked live on every keystroke. ⌘1–⌘9 jump straight to a match.

    ▣

    One window or all of them

    ⌥⌘O captures the focused window. ⌥⌘⇧O OCRs every window on screen into one searchable list, each line tagged with its source app.

    ⬚

    Or just drag a box

    ⌥⌘S dims the screen to a crosshair — drag a rectangle and every line of text inside it goes straight to your clipboard as one clean line, newlines stripped. No palette, no typing.

    ◉

    Fully offline

    Apple's Vision framework does the OCR on your Mac. No network, no accounts, no telemetry — captures live in memory only for the duration of a search.

    How it works

    Three keystrokes between pixels and clipboard.

    1.

    Summon ⌥⌘O

    The screen is captured and OCR'd on-device in a blink. The palette appears with every visible line of text, tagged by window.

    2.

    Type a few characters

    Fuzzy matching ranks the candidates as you type — matched characters highlighted, best match on top, just like fzf.

    3.

    Press ↩

    The match lands on your clipboard and focus returns to where you were, ready to paste. That's the whole trick.

    Pricing

    Cheaper than the coffee you'd drink while retyping.

    Free
    $0
    • Every feature, nothing locked
    • 250 copies on the house
    • After that, a small red reminder appears — the app keeps working forever
    Download
    Supporter license
    $1.99 once, forever
    • Silences the reminder
    • All future updates included
    • Offline license key — verified on your Mac, never phones home
    • The warm glow of supporting a tiny tool
    Buy a license
    Nothing leaves your Mac.

    Textracto asks for the Screen Recording permission because that's what reading pixels requires — and then treats it with respect: capture and recognition are entirely on-device, images are discarded the moment OCR finishes, and the app has no network code at all.