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Ghostchars for Mac: a menu-bar app that cleans the text you already have selected
One keystroke cleans the selection in place, clean-as-you-copy does it before you paste, and the weekly free cleans are counted on your own Mac. Signed, notarised, and it sends two things ever.
Veröffentlicht · 4 Min. Lesezeit
What it is
Ghostchars for Mac is a menu-bar app. There is no window to switch to: you stay in the app you were already using, and the cleaning happens where your text already is. The engine is the one behind the cleaner on this website, running on your Mac.
The gesture is one keystroke, Option-Command-V until you record a different one in Settings. With text selected, Ghostchars cleans that selection and replaces it in place, and hands your clipboard back untouched. With nothing selected, it cleans your clipboard instead and leaves the cleaned text on it, ready to paste. The app tells you which of the two just happened, because from the outside the two look identical.
The one permission, and what happens without it
Replacing a selection inside somebody else's app is the Accessibility permission, and there is no way around that: macOS does not let one app read and rewrite another app's text without it. Ghostchars asks in context, when you first press the hotkey, and only for the hotkey.
Refuse it and the app still works. The hotkey then cleans what is on your clipboard rather than the selection, and it says so instead of nagging you to change your mind. Copy, press the hotkey, paste: that is the whole flow in clipboard-only mode, and it is the mode a first run is usually in.
There is a second gesture, off until you switch it on: clean as you copy. With it on, what you copy is cleaned on its way to the clipboard, so what you paste is already clean. It spends the same weekly free cleans the hotkey spends rather than an allowance of its own, and a copy with nothing to clean in it is not counted.
What it takes out, and what it keeps
By default it removes only characters you cannot see: zero-width characters, bidi controls, tag characters, free-floating variation selectors, and spaces that are not the space bar. Characters that are doing a job stay, and are reported as kept rather than quietly dropped: the zero-width joiners holding a family emoji together, the marks Persian, Hindi and Arabic text needs, the tag characters inside a flag.
The punctuation tells are a separate switch, and it is off. Turn it on and em dashes, curly quotes, ellipses and the minus sign become their plain keyboard equivalents. That rewrites text you can see, which is why it is a choice rather than a default; the Maximum level turns that group on along with the rest.
Every clean reports the same three counts this website reports: what was removed, what was kept because it was load-bearing, and what was found but not targeted by the switches you have on. Those views are never metered and never gated. There is no score, no percentage and no verdict about who wrote the text.
Documents work the same way. Drop a .docx, .md or .txt file on the app and it tells you what is in the file, free, on every tier; writing the cleaned copy beside the original, as Name (cleaned).docx, is the part a licence unlocks. Your file is never changed.
What it costs
The hotkey and clean-as-you-copy are free 20times a week. The count lives on your Mac, resets on Monday, and is shown in the app as a running number rather than sprung on you at the twentieth. Reaching the limit refuses the next clean before anything is touched, so your clipboard is left exactly as it was. The app's own paste box is not metered at all.
$24 once lifts the limit on up to 3 of your own devices, and it is the same licence that lifts the weekly limit in the browser extension. Every version 1 update is included. There is no subscription and no account to create: activation happens once, and the licence is checked on your Mac after that.
What it needs, and what it sends
macOS 14 or later, and one universal build for Apple silicon and Intel rather than two downloads. The disk image is signed with an Apple Developer ID and notarised by Apple, so macOS opens it without a detour through System Settings. It is not in the Mac App Store and cannot be: the sandbox that store requires forbids the Accessibility API the hotkey is built on.
Updates come through Sparkle, the standard macOS updater, and install when you say so. System profiling is switched off, so the check asks for a file and sends nothing about your Mac, and you can turn checking off in Settings.
Two things leave the machine, ever: one licence activation, which happens because you pressed a button, and that update check. The text you clean is never one of them.
Download it, with the checksum · What it costs, line by line · Clean something in the browser first
Korrekturen
Wenn hier etwas falsch ist, schreib an privacy@ghostchars.com. Es wird an Ort und Stelle korrigiert, und das Aktualisierungsdatum oben im Beitrag wandert mit.