Readly

Press a hotkey, drag a region, get the text — fully on-device

Readly is a native macOS menu bar utility. Press a global hotkey, drag a rectangle over anything on screen, and the text inside is recognized and copied to your clipboard — no windows, no saved files, no cloud.

How it works

1. Press ⇧⌘2 (rebindable)
2. The screen dims and the cursor becomes a crosshair — drag over anything: an image, a video frame, a dialog, a PDF scan, non-selectable text
3. Text is recognized on-device and copied to the clipboard; a brief HUD confirms it

Privacy

Everything happens on this Mac: ScreenCaptureKit for capture, Apple's Vision framework for OCR. Readly makes no network requests and keeps no history — nothing is ever uploaded anywhere.

Requirements

• macOS 14+ on Apple Silicon
• Screen Recording access (see Permissions)

Install

No release has been cut yet (see scripts/release.sh), so these don't have anything to fetch until the first tag ships — build from source below in the meantime.

With Homebrew:

brew tap mberrishdev/readly https://github.com/mberrishdev/Readly
brew trust --tap mberrishdev/readly
brew install --cask readly

Or grab Readly.dmg from the latest release.

Build from source:

git clone https://github.com/mberrishdev/Readly.git
cd Readly
open Readly.xcodeproj   # ⌘R

Or headless:

xcodebuild -project Readly.xcodeproj -scheme Readly -configuration Debug build

Run the tests:

xcodebuild test -project Readly.xcodeproj -scheme Readly -destination 'platform=macOS'

Using it

Action	Gesture
Capture text	Press ⇧⌘2, drag a selection
Cancel a selection	Press the hotkey again, or Esc
Everything else	Menu bar icon → Settings

The hotkey is rebindable in Settings → Shortcut.

Permissions

Readly needs Screen Recording access to capture the area you select. A first-launch onboarding window walks through granting it, rather than a cold system prompt firing off your first hotkey press.

macOS may show two dialogs — approve both:

1. The classic Screen Recording toggle
2. A newer one confirming Readly captures your selection directly, instead of through the system's window picker (Readly's own selection overlay replaces that picker)

Updates

Readly checks a static appcast.xml once a day via Sparkle and verifies every update's EdDSA signature before installing it — no backend involved. Toggle automatic checks and downloads, or check manually, in Settings → Updates.

Architecture

Readly is a pipeline, not an app with screens:

Hotkey → Selection overlay → Screen capture → OCR (Vision) → Clipboard + HUD

One coordinator (CaptureCoordinator) executes the effects of a small, pure, unit-tested state machine (CaptureFlowMachine); everything else is a dumb service it calls in order.

• App/ — composition root, menu bar, onboarding
• Coordinator/ — the state machine and the coordinator driving it
• Overlay/ — the selection window and the Cocoa/display/pixel coordinate math
• Services/ — hotkey, capture (ScreenCaptureKit), OCR (Vision), output (clipboard + HUD), permissions
• Settings/ — the settings window and its preferences store
• Updates/ — SparkleUpdaterService, wrapping Sparkle so nothing else imports it
• ReadlyTests/ — coordinate math and flow/re-entrancy rules, pinned with Swift Testing

Roadmap

• Language auto-detection
• Capture history
• Table detection → paste as CSV
• Translate after capture

License

MIT