Productivity
CodeSnip
Capture any region of the screen and copy it as text.
Get for Mac.dmg · 369 KB · or download .zip
- Category
- Productivity
- Requires
- macOS 13+
- Size
- 369 KB
- Price
- Free
Preview
About CodeSnip
CodeSnip copies text out of anything on your screen.
What it does
- Hotkey. Press Control+Option+S, drag a rectangle, and the text is recognised.
- Keeps layout. Uses the position of each line to keep indentation, and can copy tables as TSV.
- Modes for Code, Table and Plain text, with the best guess chosen for you.
- Drop or paste an image instead, which needs no permission.
Notes
macOS asks for Screen Recording permission the first time you capture. Recognition is not perfect on small or low-contrast text.
Information
- Developer
- SiliconDevKit (generated by AI from a prompt)
- Category
- Productivity
- Compatibility
- macOS 13 or later, Apple silicon. Apple silicon Macs only (M1 or later), not Intel
- Size
- 369 KB (.dmg)
- Version
- 1.0
- Price
- Free
- Signing
- Ad-hoc signed, not notarized
The prompt behind it
This app was generated from the prompt below. Paste it into SiliconDevKit to build your own version, then change it however you like.
Build a menu bar app called CodeSnip that copies text out of anything on screen. A global hotkey (Control+Option+S, registered with the Carbon RegisterEventHotKey API) or a menu bar button starts a region selection by running /usr/sbin/screencapture -i -c, which lets the user drag a rectangle and puts the image on the clipboard. Read the image from the pasteboard and recognize it with the Vision framework (VNRecognizeTextRequest, accurate level, with language correction turned off for code). Use the bounding boxes to keep the original indentation (estimate the character width, and convert the left offset of each line into spaces), keep straight quotes and symbols, and detect tables so they can be copied as TSV. Offer modes Code, Table (TSV) and Plain text, with the best guess selected automatically, and show the result in a small floating panel with monospaced text and a Copy button, plus a thumbnail of the capture. Also accept a dropped or pasted image, so it works without screen permission. Explain in the first launch screen that macOS will ask for Screen Recording permission. No Dock icon.
Opening it for the first time
- Open the .dmg and drag CodeSnip onto the Applications folder.
- Open it from Applications. macOS may say it can’t check the app for malicious software. Click Done.
- Open System Settings → Privacy & Security and click Open Anyway. This is needed once. Why this happens. To share an app without the warning, see how to notarize it.
