Reword ✨

Select text. Hit a shortcut. Watch your AI rewrite it — right where it was.

No clipboard hassle. No app switching. No context lost.

Download · Features · Getting started · Providers · Build from source

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Ever written something a little too fast — typos, awkward phrasing, a tone that's not quite right — and wished you could just fix it without breaking your flow? That's Reword.

It sits quietly in your Mac's menu bar. Select any text, anywhere — an email, a Slack message, a comment in your code editor, a form on a website — press a shortcut, and it's rewritten in place. Your own text assistant, and you're fully in control of which AI powers it.

flowchart LR
    A["✍️ Select text<br/>in any app"] --> B["⌨️ Press your<br/>shortcut"]
    B --> C["🧠 Your AI<br/>rewrites it"]
    C --> D["✅ Replaced<br/>in place"]

    style A fill:#4C6EF5,color:#fff,stroke:none
    style B fill:#7048E8,color:#fff,stroke:none
    style C fill:#AE3EC9,color:#fff,stroke:none
    style D fill:#37B24D,color:#fff,stroke:none

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💡 Why you'll like it

🌍 Works everywhere	Native Mac apps, Electron apps, browsers — if you can select text, Reword can rewrite it.
🔑 Bring your own AI	OpenAI, Anthropic, Ollama, your local Claude CLI login, or any other LLM CLI.
🎛️ You define "reword"	Fix spelling, sound more professional, shorten a wall of text, translate — built-in presets, or write your own.
📋 Barely touches your clipboard	Reads/writes your selection directly via macOS Accessibility — no clipboard involved in most apps.
🔒 Your keys stay yours	Stored in the macOS Keychain, never on disk in plain text, one slot per provider.
🌐 Speaks your language	English by default, French included — follows your Mac's per-app language setting.
👀 Never leaves you guessing	A small overlay near your cursor shows progress and success/failure, live.

🚀 Getting started

1. Grab the app. Download the latest DMG from Releases, or build it from source.
2. Open it once. Not notarized by Apple yet, so macOS will refuse to open it the first time — right-click the app → Open to tell macOS you trust it. Only needed once.
3. Say yes to Accessibility. Reword asks for this on first launch — it needs it to read your selection and write the result back. Grant it any time in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility.
4. Pick your AI. Menu bar icon → Settings… → Provider, choose one, hit Test Connection.
5. Try it. Select some text anywhere, press your shortcut (⌘⌥← by default, fully changeable), and watch it get rewritten.

No accounts to create with Reword itself, no onboarding wizard. Just you, your AI, and your text.

🧠 What it can do

• A global shortcut to rewrite text using whichever preset is active, plus an optional dedicated shortcut per preset.
• Presets you can shape to your liking — Fix Spelling, Rephrase Professionally, Shorten, Translate to English come built in; edit, remove, or add your own.
• A language instruction (Settings → General) so the AI keeps replies in whatever language you wrote in, unless you're specifically asking it to translate.
• Rephrase Now / Cancel in the menu — trigger a rewrite without memorizing the shortcut, or stop one that's taking too long (there's also a 45-second automatic timeout).

🔌 Bring your own AI

Open Settings → Provider tab:

Provider	What you'll need	Good to know
🌐 OpenAI-compatible API	Base URL, API key, model name	OpenAI, LM Studio, vLLM, OpenRouter, and more
🟣 Anthropic (Claude)	API key, model (pick from a list)	Talks straight to Anthropic, no middleman
🦙 Ollama	Just the host address	No API key — great for running models locally
⌨️ Claude CLI (claude -p)	Claude Code installed and logged in	Reuses your existing login, no API key
🛠️ Custom Command	A command + arguments ({system}/{model} placeholders, text on stdin)	Drives any local LLM CLI — Gemini CLI, llm, your own script

Whichever you pick, hit Test Connection — it sends a tiny test message so you know it's wired up correctly before you rely on it.

💡 Tip: for Ollama, gemma4:e2b is a great default — it's light and works really well for quick rewrites.

🛠 Building it yourself

You'll need Xcode 15+ and XcodeGen:

brew install xcodegen   # skip if you already have it
xcodegen generate
open Reword.xcodeproj

Then hit Run in Xcode. Prefer the terminal?

xcodegen generate
xcodebuild -project Reword.xcodeproj -scheme Reword -configuration Release build

Requires macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later. For the Claude CLI provider, you'll also need the claude CLI installed and logged in.

To build a distributable .app + .dmg in one step:

scripts/build-dmg.sh

Keeping macOS permissions across rebuilds

Without a paid Developer ID, local builds are signed ad-hoc by default — and ad-hoc signatures are derived from the binary's own hash, so every rebuild looks like a different app to macOS, silently revoking the Accessibility permission each time. If you're iterating on the source and don't want to re-grant Accessibility after every build, create a stable local signing identity once:

scripts/create-local-signing-identity.sh

scripts/build-dmg.sh automatically detects and uses it afterwards. It's a self-signed certificate stored in your login keychain — nothing is uploaded anywhere, and it doesn't need to be trusted by anyone else's Mac, only consistent on yours.

Running the tests

xcodegen generate
xcodebuild -project Reword.xcodeproj -scheme Reword -destination "platform=macOS" test

Cutting a release

Bump MARKETING_VERSION/CFBundleShortVersionString in project.yml if needed, then push a matching tag:

git tag v0.1.0
git push origin v0.1.0

.github/workflows/release.yml builds the DMG and publishes it to Releases automatically.

🔍 Under the hood

A few things worth knowing if you're reading the code or hitting an edge case:

• Text access: Reword tries the Accessibility API first (no clipboard involved), and only falls back to synthesized ⌘C/⌘V for apps that don't support it. The pasteboard fallback checks that the frontmost app hasn't changed mid-request before pasting, so switching away while the AI is thinking can't send your rewritten text to the wrong window.
• One request at a time: triggering the shortcut while a reformulation is already running is ignored rather than queued or interleaved, so two requests can never race over the same selection. Every request has a 45-second timeout and can be cancelled from the menu.
• Custom Command safety: external processes run with concurrent stdout/stderr draining (no deadlock on large output), a hard timeout, and cancellation support — a stuck or misbehaving CLI can't hang the app.

📄 License

No license file yet — all rights reserved by default until one is added.

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If Reword saves you a re-type or two, consider ⭐️ starring the repo.