Built this Mac app since started learn programming a year ago.

Built this Mac app since started learn programming a year ago.

I am a self-taught developer. I started to learn programming more than a year ago. Mostly Swift and Node.js. Acquired knowledge allowed me to create my first website and first macOS application. The Application has been featured by MacRumors, 9to5Mac, TNW and others. Below I will show you what is TextSniper and what it does.

Do you often find yourself retyping text, that’s uncopiable or non-selectable? Probably, yes! In this post, I’ll show you how quickly grab any text in such circumstances.

TextSniper is Mac OCR (optical character recognition) software that allows extract text from a selected portion of your screen and almost instantaneously get it saved to clipboard as editable text. It is as easy as take a screenshot.

Step 1:

After you launch the application, its icon will appear in the menu bar. Press on it and select Capture Text menu item. You can also use predefined keyboard shortcut Command+Shift+2 to start text capturing. The shortcut is customizable, which you can change in Preferences.

TextSniper Shortcut.png

Step 2:

Select the screen area with the text you want to capture. Just click and drag over some text on your screen.

Image to Text.gif

Step 3:

Captured text from screen got copied to clipboard. Paste it into your favorite text editor or note-taking app pressing CMD + V shortcut.

Paste Recognized Text.gif

As you can see, with three easy steps in no time, you can grab text from anywhere on your screen. Currently, it is great for normal text, but can have misreads when there are a lot of symbols such as you might find in computer code.

In my next posts I will write in more details how I come up with the idea, where first posted the app, how promoted it and mistakes I made. Let me know if you have any other questions.

P.S. I am 35 years old. Most of my adult life I worked at different jobs, none of them was related to programming. Last decade it was construction. I never found passion in what I do. I found this passion in programming. It's never late to change something in your life.

Originally, partially published at https://textsniper.app/blog/ on January 19, 2021.