Would you use a macOS shortcut to rewrite selected text in place
There's one AI thing I reach for more than anything else, and it's almost embarrassingly small. I'll write something in Slack, Gmail, Notion, a PR description, wherever. The idea is fine, but the sentence lands wrong. Too blunt, too long, or just not how I meant it. Like I'll type "I think we should maybe consider pushing the deadline" and I want it back as something that doesn't sound like I'm apologizing for existing. For a while I had a custom Raycast AI command for this. The flow went: write the text somewhere copy it open Raycast type "rephrase" enter rewritten version lands in my clipboard go back and paste it over the original Sounds like nothing. But I do it constantly, and the more I leaned on it the more the friction stood out. The AI part is already good enough. It's everything wrapped around it that gets me: launch the thing, find the command, push text through the clipboard, paste it back in the right spot. Which got me wondering whether this should just be its own tiny Mac app instead of a command buried three tools deep in something else. What I want is pretty dumb. Select text in any app, hit one shortcut, and a little floating panel pops up. Pick a direction (more professional, shorter, clearer, friendlier, whatever), watch the rewrite stream in, hit enter, and it swaps out the text you had highlighted. No chat window, no doc editor. Just hit the key and the sentence that was off isn't anymore. So I'm poking at building this as a small focused macOS app, and I'd rather find out now if that's pointless. Would you actually use it, or is Raycast / ChatGPT / Claude already close enough that you wouldn't bother? And if you would use it, where? Slack? email? Notion? comments in your editor? The part I'm most stuck on is trust. What would make you comfortable firing this off dozens of times a day without rereading every result before you let it replace your text?
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I would not use it because I feel that the more I lean on AI, the worse my writing skills become. I’d prefer to write my own text and incrementally improve it over time.
Fair point. I don’t see this as drafting from nothing; more as editing something you already wrote when the intent is right but the phrasing is off. But I agree that making every message sound like generic AI would be a bad outcome.
Bro I feel nowadays 50% of what we read has been fully written by AI, which sucks because we totally lose people's individual voices. English isn't even my main language and I put the effort to ALWAYS write everything myself, if I make mistakes someone will hopefully correct me and I'll learn / improve. AI has great potential, no doubt, but at the same time I think we are starting to use it EVERYWHERE, specially places where we shouldn't. I can't even begin to imagine the world our sons and daughters will live in, where everything is a lie, from text to pictures and videos, basically no one will know how to put two sentences together or reply to an e-mail just using the keyboard.
There are several apps, paid and free, that do that
Yup, popclip comes to mind
Apple's writing tools does this natively?
Frankly, I found the rephrase quality not so great and it’s not globally available. I don’t know why but some apps restrict its use.
I had thought of a similar thing earlier. But my workflow has transformed since then. Now I either dictate it orally or use cotypist. I understand its not the exact use case as you mentioned, but using these tools has moved me away from "writing something, then editing it later" workflow.
I actually have a very similar workflow now for most of my use cases. The tool I’m referring to here is more for quick interactions writing a short Slack message, replying to a GitHub comment, or other small text snippets. So while I also rarely follow a “write first, edit later” workflow anymore, I still find value in having a lightweight tool for these everyday micro-tasks.
I built a native menu bar app that does exactly that, you can assign global shortcuts to specific prompts like "fix grammar", "turn into markdown", "more concise", or whatever you want
Interesting, can we access to it?
the pain is real, and i think youve correctly spotted that the friction is the round-trip, not the rephrase itself. copy, leave the app, paste back, fix formatting, that's the part that breaks flow. two honest things if you go build it though: the hard part isnt the AI call, its reliably replacing the selection across arbitrary apps. macOS has no universal "replace selected text" api. tools fake it one of two ways: read the selection via Accessibility then synth-paste (cmd+c, call model, cmd+v), or type the result back. both have sharp edges. some apps dont expose AX selection at all, the clipboard route clobbers whatever you already had copied unless you save and restore it, and rich text vs plain text round-trips badly. thats where these tools live or die, not the model. heads up that on Tahoe, Apple's Writing Tools already does in-place rewrite system-wide (select, right click, rewrite). so the bar for a new one is "what does Writing Tools NOT do". the obvious gap: it wont take a custom instruction or your own saved presets, it's just rewrite/friendly/concise. a version where i hit one key and say "make this less apologetic" from my own prompt library is a real, unfilled niche. and re the person worried it'll rot your writing, i'd actually argue your specific flow is the safe version of this. youre rephrasing a sentence YOU already wrote, not generating from a blank page. the muscle you keep is "i know what i meant", you're just outsourcing the polish.
This is definitely something I’d love to have the ability to create your own custom presets. I also think it would be great if the app could automatically select the appropriate preset based on the app you’re currently using. For example, when you’re in Slack, it could automatically switch to the “Make Professional” preset by default.
honestly you just described half my actual job. i'm in customer success, so i spend all day turning "this is broken" into something a customer won't take the wrong way, and that copy, open raycast, paste loop wore a groove in my brain too. the trust part is the whole game though. what finally got me to stop rereading every result was making it impossible to lose the original. if the old text is always one undo away, you stop thinking about it and just fire. the second the thing can quietly change what you actually meant, you're back to checking every word. so i'd keep the rewrites boring on purpose, tone and length only, never meaning. slack and gmail are your easy wins. the native mac text fields are where you'll lose a weekend.
I agree completely. Most tools I have tested do more than requested, which is frustrating. Why can native Mac text fields be problematic?
There are literally dozens of apps that you can configure in such a way, or that even natively do what you ask for. Just to name a few: Alter, BoltAI, Fluent, Kerlig, RewriteBar
I use DeepL's Translate and Rewrite Global hotkeys to translate and rephrase my writings. And they are mostly accurate. However like others mentioned, they are many free/paid ways to achieve your goal. I like above-mentioned one as it is simple, and does its job perfectly* edit: added DeepL website link
If you really do this 20 times per day you need to learn to write better rather.
Bettertouchtool?
I use Alter for this.
I actually built OnText for almost exactly this use case.
I've done this in vscode because I don't know lua syntax, I just write python, highlight then ask it to rewrite in lua.
use this one I built for myself, with inline replacement and customs prompts and can use local models. https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/comments/1u47gci/a_little_macos_floating_assistant_for_apple/
I built MyRephra for the same purpose, and it accomplishes this using either on-device Ollama or cloud-based models.