SpellBound

Rewrite any text, anywhere on your Mac, without leaving the app you're in.

macOS menu bar app · SwiftUI · Powered by your own OpenAI key

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The problem

You write in Slack, Gmail, Notion, your terminal, a Jira ticket. When you want AI help with a sentence, you copy it, switch to ChatGPT, paste, prompt, copy the result, switch back, paste again. Six steps to fix one sentence — every single time.

SpellBound removes the round trip. Select text → hit a shortcut → pick what you want → the text is replaced in place. It works in every macOS app, because it drives the system Accessibility API rather than living inside a browser tab.

What it does

Select text anywhere and press ⌃⇧⌘I:

Grammar Genius	Fix grammar and spelling in place
Tone Wizzard	Rewrite as formal, casual, concise, descriptive, viral, emotional, inspiring, humorous, sarcastic or poetic
Write on	Keep writing from where you stopped
Quickfire Replies	Draft a reply to the selected message
Text to Code	Turn a description into a code snippet
Translate	English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hindi

Why it's different

• Works everywhere — Discord, Mail, Xcode, any native or web app. Not a browser extension, not another chat window.
• Replaces text in place — no copy-paste dance. The selection is swapped for the result.
• Your key, your data — you bring your own OpenAI API key. It's stored in the macOS Keychain and requests go straight from your Mac to OpenAI. There is no middleman server.
• Menu bar native — SwiftUI, ~2 MB, launches at login, stays out of the way.

Build it

Requires macOS 13.1+ and Xcode 14+.

git clone https://github.com/basilboli/SpellBoundMenuBarApp.git
cd SpellBoundMenuBarApp
open SpellBoundMenuBar.xcodeproj

Set your own signing team in Signing & Capabilities (the committed project has it blank), then build and run. Dependencies resolve automatically via SwiftPM: KeyboardShortcuts and LaunchAtLogin-Modern.

To package a DMG:

./create_dmg.sh

Set it up

1. Add your OpenAI key — Preferences → paste a key from platform.openai.com. It's saved to the Keychain, never to disk in plaintext.
2. Grant Accessibility permission — System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility. This is how SpellBound reads your selection and types the replacement back. It's required; the app can't work without it.
3. Pick your shortcut — defaults to ⌃⇧⌘I.

Notes for contributors

• Services/OpenAIConnector.swift — the OpenAI chat completions call (gpt-4o-mini)
• Services/SuggestService.swift — every prompt template lives here; add a tone by adding a method
• Services/AccessilityService.swift — reads the selection and writes the result back
• MenuManager.swift — builds the popup menu
• Services/GumroadConnector.swift — Gumroad license verification. Product IDs are read from Info.plist (GumroadMembershipProductID / GumroadLifetimeProductID), which ship empty in this repo — set your own to enable the check.

No secrets live in source. The OpenAI key and the user's license key are both stored in the macOS Keychain (Services/Keychain.swift), and prompt/response contents are only logged under #if DEBUG, never in Release builds.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.