Select text anywhere. Press a hotkey. Get a better version back, in place.
redrafter is a menu-bar app that refines the text you're already writing: in
Slack, in your mail client, in a text field on a web page. Select it, press
Ctrl+Alt+R, and the polished version replaces your selection. No window to
switch to, no copy-paste round trip.
It talks to whichever model you point it at: a local one through Ollama, or Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Your text goes to that provider and nowhere else; with Ollama it never leaves the machine.
Grab a build from the latest release.
| Platform | File | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| macOS (Apple Silicon) | .dmg |
Signed with a Developer ID and notarized |
| Linux | .AppImage, .deb, .rpm |
Requires glibc 2.39+ (Ubuntu 24.04, Debian 13) |
| Windows | -setup.exe |
On first launch macOS will ask for Accessibility permission. redrafter needs it to read your selection and type the replacement back; there is no way to do that without it. Nothing else is requested.
With no instructions, redrafter applies a light grammar-and-clarity polish that preserves your voice. It won't summarize you or change what you meant.
When you want something specific, say so inside the selection itself:
| Command | Meaning |
|---|---|
/rd <direction> |
An instruction: /rd make it formal and much shorter |
/m <message> |
Marks where your own message starts |
/q <quote> |
Text you're replying to (usually detected automatically; this overrides) |
/lang <code> |
Write the result in another language: /lang de |
They combine. Selecting this:
/rd keep it warm but brief /lang de /m sorry for the delay, we shipped Friday
sends the direction and the language, treats only the last part as your message, and pastes back a warm, brief German reply.
A preset is a saved direction with a name. Five ship with the app (/formal,
/concise, /friendly, /bullets, /reply), and you can add your own,
override a built-in, or reset it back. A sixth, Default, has no trigger:
it is the direction used when a selection names no preset, and editing it
changes what a plain refine does. Each preset can pin its own model and
override the language or inject mode.
/formal we good with the release plan i think, no delays i hope
Everything is in the app window; the menu-bar icon opens it.
Connections: one entry per provider endpoint. Anthropic, Gemini, Ollama, or any OpenAI-compatible URL. Each connection is tested before it's saved, and its model list is discovered from the endpoint rather than hard-coded. If you use Claude Code, one button imports its login instead of asking for an API key.
Models: pick which discovered models are available and which one is active.
Behavior:
- Writing rules: house rules applied to every refine, whatever preset or
/rdis in play - no em dashes, no litotes, whatever you want to hold the model to. They ship with a starter set, you edit them freely, and where an explicit instruction contradicts a rule the instruction wins on that point. - Inject mode: blind pastes the result straight back; review & confirm opens a panel first so you can edit or discard it.
- On failure: retry count, a fallback chain of models to try in order, and whether to notify you.
- Quote handling: when you're replying to something, whether the result is
the answer only, the answer with the quote kept, or left to
/rdto decide. - History retention: how many past refines to keep.
History: every refine is recorded. Search it, copy a result, restore the original, or re-run one through whatever model is active now.
General: hotkey (rebindable, with conflict detection), theme, launch at login, Accessibility status.
More screens
API keys are encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM before they touch disk. The
master key is 32 random bytes in a sibling 0600 file.
That keeps keys out of the plaintext config and out of ad-hoc backups, but it is honest about its limit: an attacker who already has your OS user account has the master key too. On macOS you can opt into the system Keychain instead, which does defend against that.
Everything else (settings, presets, history) is SQLite in the app's own data directory. There is no telemetry and no account.
You'll need Rust (stable), Node 20+ (CI builds on 24), and pnpm. On Linux
you'll also need Tauri's system dependencies; see
the Tauri prerequisites, or read
.ci/Dockerfile.linux, which lists exactly what CI
installs.
git clone https://github.com/Tapnetix/redrafter.git
cd redrafter/app
pnpm install
pnpm tauri dev # run it
pnpm tauri build # produce installers for the current platformcargo nextest run --workspace # Rust: 964 tests
cd app && pnpm test # frontend units: 283 tests
cd app && pnpm e2e # Playwright, IPC-mocked: 85 testsThe Playwright suite drives the real React app against a mocked Tauri IPC layer,
so it's broad but proves nothing about the Rust side being wired up.
e2e-real/ is the harness that drives the actual packaged binary
through WebDriver, on a real desktop session.
cargo nextest rather than cargo test is deliberate: the GTK tray
initialization crashes when several tests share a process, so every test needs
its own.
app/ Tauri app: Next.js frontend (app/src) + Rust backend (app/src-tauri)
crates/
llm-provider Provider clients: Anthropic, Gemini, Ollama, OpenAI-compatible
text-inject Capture and inject text per platform (AX-first, clipboard fallback)
docs/wireframes Interactive HTML prototypes of every screen
e2e-real/ Real-binary acceptance harness
.ci/ Linux CI image and build script
text-inject is the interesting one. It goes through the platform accessibility
API first (macOS AX, Windows UI Automation, X11/Wayland tools on Linux), verifies
the write actually landed, and only then falls back to the clipboard, always
saving and restoring whatever you had on it. Refining a sentence should not cost
you what you copied five minutes ago.
Early development, and macOS-first: that's where it's used daily and where the platform work is most complete. Linux and Windows builds are produced and tested on every commit, but have had far less real-world use.
MIT. See LICENSE.