Screen vocabulary capture, without breaking your flow

The hardest part of building vocabulary while reading isn't memory, it's the interruption. Each time you stop to copy a word, switch to another app, and paste it, you spend more attention on logistics than on the sentence in front of you, and the thread of what you were reading frays a little.

Screen vocabulary capture is built to make that cost vanish. One shortcut reads the word and its sentence straight from your screen, and saving takes a single keystroke. Your attention stays on the page, and the act of collecting a word stops competing with the act of reading.

Capecho lives behind a single global shortcut on macOS, so it doesn't matter which app you're reading in. A browser article, a PDF, a documentation site, a code editor, a paused video frame: press the shortcut and Capecho captures the word and the surrounding sentence wherever you are.

That universality is the point of capturing words from the screen rather than from inside one particular app. You don't go to your vocabulary tool; it comes to whatever you're already reading, and then gets out of the way.

Capture runs on macOS's built-in on-device text recognition, the engine behind Live Text. It reads the text at the instant you press the shortcut and returns only that text — the screen image itself never reaches Capecho. There's no background scanning and nothing leaves your machine.

macOS asks for a permission it labels Screen Recording to allow this, but that's the operating system's name for the mechanism, not a description of Capecho's behavior. Capecho never records or streams your screen. If you'd rather skip that permission, a copy-paste mode reads only the selection you've copied, and only after you press the shortcut.

Speed and control don't have to trade off. The capture preview is quick by default, but it's a place you can edit before saving: fix a character recognition got wrong, tighten the sentence, or strip out anything you'd rather not keep. You approve what gets saved.

That keeps your library deliberately yours instead of a dump of whatever was on screen. The captured word stays fixed once it's in, while the context sentence and its gloss remain editable, so refining a word later never means re-capturing it.

Capecho doesn't just grab the word, it keeps the exact sentence you met it in. That sentence is what makes the word memorable later: when it comes back for review, you recall not only a definition but the moment and the meaning you first attached to it.

Along with the sentence comes a free word explanation, generated from the word alone and shared from a public cache, so your sentence is never part of what's cached. When you want the word explained as used in your specific sentence, that in-context explanation is metered: ten a day, free (unlimited on Pro), and never a blocker for anything else.

On your Mac today, saved words return as FSRS spaced-repetition cards fronted by your own sentence, surfacing right before you'd forget so a quick capture turns into lasting memory, with no deck to build by hand. You can also export anything to Anki or CSV whenever you want, with a target-language column for multi-language decks.

Capecho is built first for English, the first quality-validated target, but you can capture and save other languages now too. A companion for reviewing on your phone is coming, so the words you capture from the screen at your desk will be able to come back during the small gaps in your day.