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Ghostchars

Ghostchars for Mac

A menu-bar app that cleans the text you are working with, wherever you are working: one keystroke, no window to switch to, nothing leaving your Mac.

  • Lives in the menu bar
  • Signed and notarised
  • No telemetry, no account
Download for macOS
Version
1.5.1
Size
7.7 MB
Released

Verify what you downloaded

Run shasum -a 256 against the file you got and compare it with the digest below. They should match exactly; if they do not, do not open it, and tell us.

SHA-256

5762afab0750480f5568e01561a643e9236372f5bbdfb9eed15fb6e3c6714227
The Ghostchars menu-bar popover after cleaning pasted text: two hidden characters removed, two kept because they are load-bearing.
The popover: paste, clean, see exactly what changed.
The Ghostchars document report for a Word file, listing the hidden characters to remove, the ones to keep, and where each one sits in the document.
A full document report: every hidden character, and where it is.
The third onboarding screen, showing the Ghostchars hotkey used on a copied sample and the result: two hidden characters removed.
Onboarding ends on a real hotkey clean, not a demo.

What it needs

  • macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later.
  • Apple silicon and Intel: one universal build, not two downloads.
  • The Accessibility permission, asked for in context and only for the hotkey. Refuse it and the app still works: the hotkey then cleans what is on your clipboard instead of the selection, and it tells you so rather than nagging.

What you download

A disk image, signed with an Apple Developer ID and notarised by Apple, so macOS opens it without a detour through System Settings. Drag Ghostchars into Applications, launch it once, and it appears in the menu bar. There is no installer, no background daemon and no login item you did not ask for.

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. A direct download is the honest way to ship this, so it is the only way we ship it.

Updates

The app checks for updates through Sparkle, the standard macOS updater, and installs one when you say so. System profiling is switched off: the check asks for a file and sends nothing about your Mac. You can turn checking off in Settings, and the previous release stays linked from this page either way.

Update feed

What the app sends

Two things, ever: one licence activation, which happens because you pressed a button, and Sparkle's update check. No analytics, no crash reporting, no account. The text you clean is never one of them. Rewrite in my voice runs a local model on your Mac and sends nothing, and the messages you import stay on your Mac until you delete them.

Next

What it costs

Free 20 times a week through the hotkey and clean-as-you-copy, which stays off until you turn it on; $24 once for unlimited use on up to 3 devices. The full split is on the pricing page.

Pricing

The browser extension

Free, unlimited in its popup and right-click menu, and it collects nothing. It works today, in Chrome and the browsers built on it.

Chrome extension

Anonymous usage stats?

Ghostchars processes your text in the browser and never uploads it. We would like to count page views with a self-hosted, cookie-light analytics endpoint. No content, ever.