A lightweight, privacy-focused macOS menu bar app for instant OCR (Optical Character Recognition). Capture any part of your screen and extract text immediately.
- ⚡️ Instant Capture: Global hotkey (
Cmd + Option + A) to start capturing immediately. - 🔒 Privacy First: Uses Apple's on-device Vision Framework. No data is ever uploaded to the cloud.
- 📋 Auto-Copy: Recognized text is automatically copied to your clipboard.
- 🌍 Multi-Language: Optimized for English, Chinese (Simplified & Traditional), Japanese, and Korean.
- 🎨 Native Experience: Built with SwiftUI and AppKit, designed to feel right at home on macOS.
- 🪶 Lightweight: Minimal resource usage, runs quietly in your menu bar.
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Clone the repository:
git clone https://github.com/yourusername/OCR4Mac.git cd OCR4Mac -
Run directly via CLI (for testing):
swift run
-
Or package as an App Bundle:
chmod +x package_app.sh ./package_app.sh
Then drag
OCR4Mac.appto your/Applicationsfolder.
- Launch the App: The app runs in the background with a menu bar icon.
- Capture: Press
Cmd + Option + A. - Select: Drag to select the area containing text.
- Done: The text is extracted, copied to your clipboard, and displayed in a floating result window.
- Language: Swift 5
- UI: SwiftUI & AppKit
- OCR Engine: Apple Vision Framework (
VNRecognizeTextRequest) - Architecture: Lightweight, executable Swift package structure
On the first launch, macOS will ask for Screen Recording permission. This is required to capture the screen pixels for OCR processing.
- Go to System Settings > Privacy & Security > Screen Recording and enable OCR4Mac.
- Basic OCR & Clipboard Copy
- Global Hotkey (
Cmd + Option + A) - Multi-language Support (Chinese/English/Japanese/Korean)
- Customizable Hotkeys
- History Management
- Text Translation Integration (LLM)
Contributions are welcome! Please feel free to submit a Pull Request.
This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.