AlembicRewrite lives in your menu bar. Highlight text in any app, press a hotkey, and it rewrites in place through Claude or OpenAI, in the style you choose.
No window to switch to. No copy and paste. Your keys and your text stay on your Mac.
One tool, many styles. Each style is yours to shape: its own prompt, its own model, its own hotkey.
Press Cmd+Shift+R and your selected text is replaced in place, no window, no confirmation. Undo from the menu bar within your chosen window, and your clipboard is always restored afterwards.
Press Cmd+Shift+E for a searchable palette of all your styles. Type to filter, arrow to choose, press Return to run.
For styles you set to review first, a panel shows the original beside the rewrite. Not right yet? Iterate with a follow-up instruction, then accept.
Build as many styles as you like. Give each one its own prompt template, pick Claude or OpenAI and the exact model, set the temperature, and bind a direct hotkey.
The flagship default style turns a rough prompt into an effective one using the Directional Prompting method, so you can draft loosely and let the style sharpen it.
Your API keys and history live only on your Mac, with history retention you control. Requests go straight from your machine to Anthropic or OpenAI, with no vendor server in the middle. A running cost meter tracks your spend, and a monthly cap stops rewrites at the ceiling you set.
The whole loop happens where you already are. You never leave the app you are typing in.
Highlight any text, in your email, editor, browser, or notes.
Press a style's direct key, or open the palette and pick one.
The selection is replaced in place, in the style you chose.
Frosted glass for the chrome, solid opaque panes for anything you read or type. Built in SwiftUI, tuned for macOS.
Glass is for chrome, solid is for reading. The palette and review panel float on frosted glass, while the text you read and edit stays on pinned, opaque paper.
Download the disk image, drag the app across, and add your own API key. Nothing to sign up for.
Grab AlembicRewrite.dmg (6.9 MB) from the download button above, then open it and drag AlembicRewrite into your Applications folder.
Because the app is not notarised through the App Store, macOS blocks it once. Double-click the app and let macOS refuse it, then open System Settings > Privacy & Security, scroll down, and click Open Anyway. On macOS 14 you can instead right-click the app and choose Open twice. Once only, either way.
On first run the app asks for Accessibility access, which is how it reads your selection and pastes the rewrite back. Approve it in System Settings when prompted.
Open Settings from the menu-bar icon and paste an Anthropic or OpenAI key into the API Keys tab. The key is stored locally and used only for your own direct requests.
Highlight a sentence anywhere, press Cmd+Shift+R for an instant rewrite, or Cmd+Shift+E to pick a style. That is the whole loop.