Show HN: Textracto – fzf for your screen (macOS)

Hi HN!

Textracto is a macOS app (14+) that lets you effortlessly copy text, even when it's unselectable.

Option-Space lets you fuzzy-find any text on screen, then select it or copy it to your clipboard, without ever using the mouse.

I'm often asked to get IDs out of screenshots, and I like using extrakto (https://github.com/laktak/extrakto/) for copying text in my terminal, so why not have the same thing for the rest of my screen?

It combines two sources. The Apple AX API is the first pass. At the same time, the Apple Vision API OCRs the screen to capture text from the parts that don't play well with AX, or that are actually images. Both stream into the palette as they get recognized and deduplicated, so even with a slow AX tree, Textracto is still fast.

Permissions: Screen Recording to read the screen, Accessibility to read exact characters and to click.

Privacy: nothing leaves your computer.

I wanted to make it FOSS, but my wife said that if we were paying for an Apple Developer account and a domain, I had to at least try to make the money back. So it's closed source and paid: 250 free uses, then an unobtrusive reminder to buy a license. Make her happy and I'll make it FOSS. It's $2.49 during the beta launch period and $4.99 after.

What's on your screen that you can't select?