I made text selection on macOS programmable
Details
- External ID
- 49549079
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- I made text selection on macOS programmable
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- Sept. 3, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 5
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.12998405103668262
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 10, 2026, 5:31 a.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 10, 2026, 5:31 a.m.
Enrichment
- Theme
- native desktop apps and utilities
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- programmable text selection for macos
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Intercepting system-wide text selection on macOS requires low-level native macOS programming (Swift/Objective-C), Accessibility API hooks, and system event taps, which AI assistants cannot reliably configure without deep platform expertise.
What it would actually take: A native macOS app written in Swift using Xcode and Cocoa frameworks. It requires tapping into system-wide events via `AXUIElement` (macOS Accessibility API) or CGEvent taps to detect global text selection across arbitrary applications, along with IPC mechanisms or an embedded scripting engine (like JavaScriptCore or AppleScript) to manipulate the selection. Deep understanding of macOS sandbox permissions, TCC accessibility authorizations, and AppKit lifecycle is required.
Discussion
4 comments analyzed.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 282 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #236 of 283 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 307 days after the earliest competitor.
- TypeSeer · hn · 2026-09-18 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.58
- Mutate · hn · 2026-03-13 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- Reader · hn · 2026-09-19 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- Custom Search Engine on Safari and Spotlight (macOS) · hn · 2026-03-06 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- Textracto · hn · 2026-08-05 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- I made a browser tool that creates newspaper and book text match cuts · hn · 2026-09-17 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- ellipsis · github · 2026-09-17 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Pasly · hn · 2026-07-20 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.47
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a dev tools tool for Sales yet.