CopyLasso, a free local screen OCR app for macOS
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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/copylassoFeedback and ideas for features to add appreciated!
HN · launched Aug 19, 2026 · 9 upvotes (top 47%) · 0 views
Niche: document processing and ocr software · 202 launches, 16 in the last 7 days ▼ -27% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Workflow automation
- Prosumer
- AI feature
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 202 launches in document processing and ocr software →
Could you build this?
Yes It is a native Swift utility that integrates standard macOS ScreenCaptureKit and Apple's built-in Vision framework for local OCR.
Discussion
No comments on this launch.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 515 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #239 of 516 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 294 days after the earliest competitor.
- TextGrab · ph · 2026-09-15 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.66
- PixelScan · ph · 2026-10-21 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.60
- ScreenshotPlus · ph · 2026-09-18 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.58
- Letra · ph · 2026-10-10 · 66 upvotes · similarity 0.58
- Capso · ph · 2026-04-11 · 268 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- Tucko · ph · 2026-10-22 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- Buffer · ph · 2026-10-10 · 72 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- Clipappboard · ph · 2026-10-05 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.52
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