CopyLasso, a free local screen OCR app for macOS

What it does

Copy anything on your Mac screen. CopyLasso turns selected pixels into clipboard text with private, on-device OCR.

Draw around text you can see anywhere on your Mac. CopyLasso reads the pixels locally and puts clean text on your clipboard. A demonstration shows a street sign reading 7th Street above a storefront reading Starbucks Coffee. A selection is drawn around both, producing the clipboard text 7th Street Starbucks. Fully free and MIT open source. Screenshots are never stored. Capture History is off by default and encrypted locally if enabled. Recognize supported codes as inert plain text, ready to paste. Choose and prioritize the OCR languages available on your Mac. Photos, paused videos, remote desktops, menus, and code are all just screen pixels. CopyLasso uses Apple Vision on device. There is…from copylasso.com

In the maker’s words, at launch

Hi HN, I made CopyLasso for text you can see but can't select: things like scanned PDFs, text in videos, and text in screenshots. I was surprised to find only a few solutions for this that were all paid, so I made a free and open source version. CopyLasso is a native Swift app built with ScreenCaptureKit and Apple…

• 
  I wrote a free Mac app to OCR any text on screen2021 · github.com · ▲321

  Get any text on your screen into your clipboard. Contribute to schappim/macOCR development by creating an account on GitHub.

• 
  CapsoApr 2026 · awesomemacapp.com · ▲269

  Free open-source screenshot & screen recorder for Mac

• 
  Copyfish – Extract text from images, videos or PDF2017 · addons.mozilla.org · ▲292

  Download Copyfish for Firefox. Do you need to extract text from images, videos or PDF? If yes, then the Copyfish free OCR software is for you. Until now, your only option was to retype the text. Copyfish is so much faster and more fun. It can do desktop screenshots and OCR, too.

• 
  Text Capture2024 · textcapture.app · ▲96

  Simple & convenient OCR tool for macOS

• 
  Text Grab2021 · apps.microsoft.com · ▲74

  Copy any text you see on screen

• IL
  I launched a super cheap and simple to use OCR tool for macOS2024 · textcapture.app · ▲24

  1. Click capture text 2. Select an area on screen with text 3. Paste the text anywhere Are there other solutions out there? Yes, the best one that I've found is Text Sniper, it $8 so I decided to learn SwiftUI and release Text Capture for $0.99. This one uses MacOS builtin Vision API under the hood so it should also improve with new macOS releases. Would love to hear your feedback!

• 
  /dev/null▲487

  a social network for devs

  Dev tools · 3d ago · dev-null.sh

• 
  Whiteboard (YC W26) – an open-source IDE for thoughtful software design▲423

  open-source IDE for thoughtful software design. Contribute to devdotfast/whiteboard development by creating an account on GitHub.

  Dev tools · 28d ago · github.com

• 
  Reladraw – A diagram language where you decide where to place things▲411

  Contribute to reladraw/reladraw development by creating an account on GitHub.

  Dev tools · 26d ago · github.com

• 
  OpenBot▲362

  Grok Bot alternative: free, local, open-source, multiplayer

  Dev tools · 23d ago · openbot.run

• 
  Talanoa▲346

  Hi HN, I’m a fullstack developer, and honestly, I’ve lost count of how many side projects I’ve worked on over the years. But one idea kept coming back to me: a different kind of email client. It first came to me in 2014: “What if we could handle emails more like conversations?” Every year, I’d revisit this concept in my “Build Notes.” Ten years later, no one had built exactly what I had in mind — so I finally decided to do it myself. That’s how Talanoa was born. I wanted something focused on people, not timelines. I was tired of marking messages as unread just to remember to reply later, or…

  Dev tools · 21d ago · talanoa.email

• 
  CoreSpeed▲332

  One MCP for everything your agents need: apps, memory, tools

  Dev tools · 28d ago · corespeed.io

• TL
  The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude▲710

  Life & fun · Aug 2026 · louisabraham.github.io

• 
  Hey Noah▲656

  A proactive AI executive assistant for founders

  AI · Aug 2026 · heynoah.io

• 
  Clipto MCP▲655

  Hey HN, We recently built Clipto. It’s a tool that lets you search over terabytes of video, audio, and images on your computer, without relying on the cloud. Motivation: we probably all had this similar experience, we know a moment exists in a video or audio, but finding it takes hours scrubbing the timeline. You can send all the media to process in the cloud, but it’s slow, expensive and raises privacy concerns. So we decided to build our own on-device media search engine. How it works (high level): 1. We ingest video, audio, image; normalize formats via ffmpeg; run content analysis to…

  Work · Aug 2026 · clipto.com

• 
  Simple algorithm and color space to generate diverse skin tones▲627

  Hello HN! I found that picking out plausible but diverse skin tones for my digital art and game development projects was kind of difficult, and I got curious about if there was a way to define a color space that made it easy. I've built a color picker and procedural generation algorithm based on the space as well as a bunch of other fun js features and demos throughout the page that use the equations. If you find it interesting, I have lots of explanations of how I built it and what properties the space has. The methodology might be a bit shaky, but hopefully the result is as helpful for…

  Life & fun · Aug 2026 · toneyalexander.github.io

• 
  AdAnt AI▲620

  Claude for viral, high-converting social ads

  AI · Aug 2026 · adant.ai

• 
  Astute▲606

  Automate your B2B brand going viral, with new media creators

  AI · Aug 2026 · company-app.joinastute.com