How it works
- Press ⇧⌘2. You can set your own shortcut in Settings, and the same command sits in the status bar menu.
- Select an area with the familiar macOS crosshair. Press Space to grab a whole window, or Esc to cancel. Multiple displays work the way you expect.
- The recognized text is on your clipboard. A notification shows what was captured, and the capture is saved to your history like any other copy.
There is nothing to configure before the first use. If you have ever pressed ⇧⌘4 to take a screenshot, you already know the selector, because it is the same system one.
Recognition runs on your Mac
Apple's built-in Vision engine does the reading. The capture never touches the network, and the screenshot itself is never written to disk: the bytes stay in memory, get recognized, and are gone. Nothing to upload, nothing left in a folder to leak later.
Two passes run behind that. An accurate pass goes first, and a faster one covers the cases where the accurate pass comes back empty, which happens with small or low-contrast text.
Recognition covers English and Russian today. More languages are planned, and I would rather name the two that work than claim a list I have not tested.
It lands in your history
This is the part a standalone capture tool does not give you. The captured text is an ordinary clipboard item, so it is still searchable a week later. Every transform works on it. Strip the line breaks out of a PDF paragraph, fix the case of a heading, clean up characters that came off a slide.
If the Stack is open when you capture, screenshots collect there instead of replacing each other, which is useful when you are pulling five error messages out of one screen.
The details that matter
- Notifications you control. The "captured" notification has its own toggle in Settings, separate from the notification you get on an ordinary copy. Turn one off and keep the other.
- Window mode included. Space in the selector captures a full window. Handy for dialogs and popovers that vanish the moment you click elsewhere.
- Images you already copied can give up their text too. Press ⇧Enter on any image in your history to paste its text. No new screenshot needed, and this works on screenshots you copied before you ever used Text Capture.
- One permission, once. macOS asks for Screen Recording access the first time. Klipto shows a window that walks you through granting it, and does not ask again.
- Pro feature. It works in full during the 14-day trial, with no card and no account.
Good for
- Error dialogs that refuse selection
- Paragraphs in PDFs and scans
- Slides and code on a video call
- Screenshots in chats and tickets
- Labels and interface text anywhere