CopyLasso, a free local screen OCR app for macOS
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 Vision. It's MIT-licensed, signed, and notarized. To use it, just press your keybind and draw a bounding box around the text you want to copy. The text is recognized locally and copied to your clipboard. Other features include copying QR codes and barcodes, multi-language…
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 Vision. It's MIT-licensed, signed, and notarized. To use it, just press your keybind and draw a bounding box around the text you want to copy. The text is recognized locally and copied to your clipboard. Other features include copying QR codes and barcodes, multi-language recognition, and (if you opt-in) encrypted capture history. Source: https://github.com/bennetthilberg/copylasso Feedback and ideas for features to add appreciated!
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