TRex

About

TRex is a Mac app that captures text from anywhere on your screen and copies it to your clipboard using OCR (optical character recognition). Its use cases include text in a PDF where you can't select it, a screenshot, a YouTube video, or a Zoom screen share. To use it, you invoke Capture from the menu bar or a configurable global shortcut, select the area of the screen you want, and the extracted text is in your clipboard. TRex lives in the menu bar and has no UI beyond that and its preferences.

TRex works offline and includes text recognition, reading of QR codes and barcodes, configurable global shortcuts, a configurable recognition language, and a custom words list. It also offers a CLI tool, automation actions such as running a Shortcut from Shortcuts.app and opening URLs found in QR codes or captured text, and URL scheme support for triggering capture and opening preferences. Integrations include an official Alfred workflow and Raycast script commands.

TRex is available from the App Store, from GitHub Releases, or via Homebrew with brew install --cask trex. It runs on macOS Big Sur (11.0) and later, and is released under the MIT license.