Textracto
fzf for your screen (macOS)
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HN · launched Aug 5, 2026 · 6 upvotes (top 69%) · 0 views
Niche: macos system utilities · 448 launches, 31 in the last 7 days ▼ -30% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Search & retrieval
- Prosumer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 448 launches in macos system utilities →
Could you build this?
Partial Building a basic macOS menu-bar app is feasible, but real-time screen OCR, bounding box text detection, coordinate mapping, and fuzzy selection across arbitrary desktop applications require deep native macOS Cocoa and Vision framework integration.
What it would actually take: A native Swift/macOS application utilizing CGWindowListCreateImage/ScreenCaptureKit for continuous screen capture, Apple's Vision framework (VNRecognizeTextRequest) for on-device OCR, and a custom fuzzy-search selection overlay. The hard part is achieving sub-millisecond, glitch-free overlay rendering across multi-monitor setups without draining battery or triggering security permissions bottlenecks.
Discussion
1 comment analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: extrakto (terminal text extraction), macOS native accessibility features
Concerns raised: Closed source rather than open source, Requires Screen Recording and Accessibility permissions, Limited free uses (250) before purchase reminder
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 620 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #458 of 621 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 278 days after the earliest competitor.
- I made text selection on macOS programmable · hn · 2026-09-03 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- mwoyeo · github · 2026-10-15 · 84 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- Shoji · ph · 2026-11-10 · 3 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- A Website to Display and Share Text in Large Font on Any Screen · hn · 2025-11-28 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- TextGrab · ph · 2026-09-15 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Zhenzhu · hn · 2026-09-16 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- switch-macos-launcher · github · 2026-10-20 · 18 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- ellipsis · github · 2026-09-17 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.46
The niche, labels, vibe code rating and competitor comparison on this page are analysis by Nicheloom. If you use them, please credit nicheloom.com. How you may use our data.