This App Can Copy Text From Literally Anything on Your Mac Screen
One of the best recent features of macOS is Live Text, which lets you copy text from images on your Mac in Preview, Quick View, or Safari modes. Honestly, it’s kind of magical – any text inside an image can be selected and copied, just like text on a website or document. Problem: This feature only works with image files, not video, and you can’t use it to copy text from a shared meeting presentation unless you take a screenshot and then extract the text from it.
Discover TRex , a free Mac app that speeds up this workaround. It works similarly to Text Extractor for Windows : select an area of the screen with the text you want, whether that text is in an image, video, or presentation. Any text in the area of the screen you select is instantly converted to text and copied to the clipboard. This functionality comes at an additional cost: TRex costs $8 on the Mac App Store or is free if you download it from Github .
Once installed, you will receive a quick tutorial on how the app works, and an icon will appear in the menu bar. From here you can launch the app or set additional keyboard shortcuts in Settings. The app itself uses the same crosshair you see when you take a screenshot on your Mac , but instead of taking a screenshot, it looks for text that can be recognized using optical character recognition (OCR). This text is then instantly copied to the clipboard.
Currently only a few languages are supported: English, German, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Chinese. The app can automatically detect the language of the copied text if you want, but it will work a little better if you choose the default setting in the settings.
I tested it a few times, and while it wasn’t perfect, it always ended up being easier than typing the text myself and saved me from the usual screenshot + OCR process. If you find that certain words are consistently misspelled (such as an unusual name), you can add that word to the Custom Words tab in Settings.
Perhaps the most unique feature is found in the automation tab. If you want, you can set the app to automatically recognize and open both URLs and QR codes. You can also automatically activate a URL scheme or even an Apple shortcut. It’s amazingly flexible—you can set it up to send the converted text anywhere you want.
However, even without setting up automation, TRex is the fastest way to copy text from places on the screen that otherwise couldn’t be easily copied. Heck, some websites even block copying altogether at the moment, but TRex works with that too. It’s worth downloading.