On the subject of great Mac utilities that make your life easier, developer Andrejs Boguckis makes one called TextSniper that quickly extracts any text from your screen — whether it’s in an image, PDF, video, Zoom call, or whatever else — and saves it to the clipboard as editable text. No longer will you have to try and re-type that text manually.

When activated from the menu bar or at the press of a keyboard shortcut — Command+Shift+2 by default — TextSniper lets you drag a selection box over any area of your screen with text in it, even (and especially) if that text is unselectable normally.

Once the text’s copied, you can go paste it into your favorite text editor or notes app or wherever else you like. Such a simple thing, yet one that will save you SO much time and hassle.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBal_eX5ajU

The app is also useful for those with visual impairments or have any other issue reading text on a screen, because it can convert text into speech on the fly, and like the OCR stuff, it’s all done on-device, no internet connection needed. As such, they don’t collect or process any data from you; everything you capture is private to you only.

TextSniper is $9 on the Mac App Store and worth every penny.