If you can see it,
you can copy it.
SnipText turns any little corner of your screen into text you can use. Drag, release, paste. It lives in your menu bar and reads everything right on your Mac.
Good ideas deserve a life beyond pixels.
See it. Snip it. Paste it.
Three moves, one shortcut away. No window to open, no file to save, no cloud round-trip to wait on.
Select
Press ⌃ ⌥ C and drag around the text. Arrow keys nudge, ⇧ resizes, ⌥ fine-tunes.
Copy
We read it on your Mac and copy it. A quiet checkmark confirms — no spinner theatre for fast snips.
Paste
Press ⌘ V wherever you need it. SnipText even hands focus back to where you were.
Watch a snip become text.
No install needed to get the feel. Run the snip and SnipText reads the sample — the same path a real capture takes.
Turn any little corner of your screen
into text you can use — a receipt,
an error message, a line from a video,
a formula, a serial number, a quote.
Your words, ready to go.
A small app that respects your screen.
Redesigned from the ground up — faster, quieter, and more at home on macOS. Here's what's working today.
Apple Vision by default. Local MLX when you want it.
Vision is instant and built into your Mac — nothing to set up. For formulas, tables, or a second take on difficult text, switch to GLM-OCR 4-bit running on Apple silicon.
- One tap to switch engines, right in the menu-bar panel
- Runtime-aware Vision language picker
- No silent fallback — you always know which engine read it
Drag it, or drive it from the keyboard.
A frozen, cached backdrop means the selection never flickers. Nudge the box one point at a time, watch the live pixel dimensions, and capture without touching the trackpad.
- Arrows move · ⇧ resizes · ⌥ fine-tunes · ↵ captures
- Live pixel read-out and luminous crop corners
- Escape or right-click cancels — your clipboard stays untouched
A result window that's actually editable.
Clean up a stray character, trim a line, then copy again or save as a text file. It shows the engine, the exact timing, and a live word and character count.
- Copy again with ⌘⇧C, or “Save as text…”
- Keep up to six recent captures this session
- Optional “keep line breaks” to preserve layout
Your words, ready to go.
Drop in an image. Or practice with no permissions.
Pull text from a PNG, JPEG, TIFF or HEIC by dragging it onto the panel — no screen access required. New to it? The permission-free practice snip teaches selection on a built-in sample.
- Orientation-aware import, up to 40 megapixels
- Practice mode copies real recognized text
- Lives in the menu bar — no Dock icon in your way
Two recognizers. Both local.
Vision for everyday speed, MLX for the hard stuff. Neither sends a pixel off your Mac.
On your Mac. Out of the cloud.
Nothing leaves the device
All recognition runs locally. There's no hosted backend, no account, and no AI API key to manage.
Memory-only by default
Captured pixels and recent text stay in memory. Session history is never written to disk — only an explicit export touches your drive.
Your text is never logged
Screenshot contents and recognized text are never written to logs — even the local model's diagnostics are discarded so nothing leaks through.
Minimal permissions
Screen Recording is yours to grant. Copy-only means no Accessibility permission, and there's no global keyboard monitoring.
Turn pixels into words.
Free to try. Lives in your menu bar. Always a shortcut away.
Requires macOS 14 Sonoma or later. Local MLX additionally needs Apple silicon and a one-time setup. Built with SwiftUI, ScreenCaptureKit and Apple Vision.
Questions, answered.
No. Every recognition runs on your Mac. There's no hosted backend, no account, and no API key. The only time SnipText touches the network is the optional, one-time MLX model download — and after that it runs fully offline.