Select a word in any app. Press ⌥F. Get the meaning, the nuance, and the translation — without leaving what you're reading.
Builds are signed but not yet notarized, so macOS checks with you before the first launch. Right-click PhraseLens.app, choose Open, then Open again. Once only — macOS remembers after that.
The statement was deliberately ambiguous. Its authors were candid about that in private: vague wording kept every option open, and made the group resilient to criticism it could not yet answer. Detractors called it obfuscation. Either way the bank approved the transfer on Friday, and the team shipped.
PhraseLens
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ambiguous
No copying. No tab-switching. No losing your place.
Any text, in any macOS app.
A panel opens right at your cursor.
The answer streams in, word by word.
Switch with ⌘1…⌘9. Your selection stays put.
Given the constraints we're operating under, it would probably be best if we circled back on this next week.
Pick a word. See the two or three it gets confused with — what each one uniquely emphasizes, when to reach for it, and how natives actually collocate it.
Not a thesaurus dump. A decision.
PhraseLens reads the text around your selection — so the ambiguity resolves itself, before you ask.
…she sat on the grassy bank and watched the river slide past the mill.
…the bank declined the transfer twice before anyone thought to call.
Same word. Same shortcut. Different answer.
Twelve providers, any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, or fully offline with Ollama. Switch whenever the bill or the mood changes.
/v1/chat/completions endpoint you run yourselfPhraseLens has no backend. Your text goes from your Mac to the provider you picked, and nowhere else.
Never UserDefaults, never a plaintext file, never a log line.
One exception, and only one: your own localhost Ollama.
Whatever was on screen gets bounded, escaped, and fenced off — never treated as an instruction.
<untrusted-context>…</untrusted-context>Lookups, vocabulary and custom actions are local JSON. Delete the folder and it's gone.
Swift and SwiftUI, top to bottom. No bundled browser engine, no JavaScript runtime shipped alongside a dictionary, no background daemon idling in your menu bar for no reason.
Duplicate any built-in action and edit its prompt, or write one from scratch. Hover a variable to see what it becomes.
Hover a row to see it on the keyboard. All of them remappable in Settings.
That's the point of shipping a privacy tool under AGPL-3.0. Clone it, build it, run the self-tests — they cover prompt isolation, the context bound, stream decoding and hotkey parsing.
⌥F and ⌥W possible. Skip it and the workspace, OCR, and manual input all still work.
One shortcut, and the word you didn't know stops being in your way.