Grabster is a macOS app that saves any word you see on screen, in any app, as a spaced-repetition flashcard with its original sentence. Hold ⌥Space, hover, release.
Free to download · macOS 14 or later
Apple Silicon and Intel
Any app that shows text on your screen: Safari, Chrome, a video player, a PDF in Preview, Books, Discord or a game, windowed or full screen. Grabster reads the pixels, not the app's text, so burned-in subtitles, text inside images and scanned PDFs work too.
Hold ⌥Space and the screen freezes. Move the pointer over a word and let go: a small panel shows the word and the language Grabster thinks it is in, and Save keeps it and copies it to the clipboard. Press Esc to cancel.
No. The hotkey is always ⌥Space for now. You can switch hold-to-grab off and on from Grabster's menu-bar icon.
Two: Accessibility and Screen Recording. Accessibility lets Grabster notice ⌥Space being held and released in any app, and keeps the space from being typed into that app. Screen Recording lets it read the words on the screen you are grabbing. Without them the rest of the app still works, but ⌥Space does nothing.
25 languages on macOS 15 or later, 14 on macOS 14. On macOS 14: English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Ukrainian, Korean, Vietnamese, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Japanese and Thai. macOS 15 adds Arabic, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Indonesian, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Swedish and Turkish; on macOS 14 the language list shows these greyed out as "needs macOS 15".
Not well yet. These languages are written without spaces between words, and Grabster's way of finding one word inside such a line is new and not yet tested by hand. You can pick them, but some grabs will catch the wrong part of the line.
In the language you pick as your own the first time you open Grabster. That list has more than 80 languages, including many you can't study in Grabster, such as Bulgarian, Persian and Tamil. Each card also has an explanation written in the language you are learning.
The word, its translation, a short gloss and an explanation in the language you are learning. Below them are a new example sentence with its translation, and the sentence you saved the word from. The speaker button reads the word with a voice installed on your Mac; IPA pronunciation is off until you switch it on in Settings.
Grabster schedules every card with FSRS, the spaced-repetition method Anki also offers. A word comes back around the time you would forget it, and each answer moves the next review earlier or later. Fill the gap practice shows a real sentence with one word missing, and you type the word.
No. Grabster schedules and reviews your cards itself, so there is nothing else to install.
No. Grabster has no Anki export; you review inside the app.
To define a new word, Grabster sends its lookup service at broker.grabster.app the word, its part of speech if known, its language, the language you read definitions in, and nearby captured text, trimmed and length-capped. With it go a random install identifier and the app's version number. Never the screenshot or the app you grabbed from. The privacy policy has the full list.
No. Screenshots, the text read from them, the name of the app you grabbed from, and everything you save are stored only on your Mac. We do not store the words you look up.
No. There are no accounts, no analytics and no tracking.
Partly. Reading the screen happens on your Mac, so you can save and study words without internet. Definitions need the lookup service: a word saved offline waits without one, and Grabster finishes the card when you are back online.
macOS 14 or later, Apple Silicon and Intel (one universal download). On macOS 14 it reads fewer languages than on macOS 15 and later.
No. Grabster is a Mac app only, and your words stay on the Mac you saved them on. There is no sync between devices yet.
Grabster is free to download.
Grabster