Alternatives, Reading Your Screen, and a Quicker Way to Open Edyt

Rewrite gives you back one version. Usually that's fine, but sometimes you can tell a second attempt might land better, and the only way to see it used to be running Rewrite again and losing the first one.

Alternatives

Alternatives sits next to Rewrite in the toolbar. Select some text, run it, and instead of one result you get several at once: a few small phrasing fixes first, then some bigger changes further down the list.

Say you're closing an email with "Let me know if you have questions." It's fine, but not quite right. Run Alternatives and the first options just tidy up the sentence, while later ones drop the hedge or land warmer. Arrow through the list, and insert or copy whichever one fits, same as any other Edyt result.

How many options you get depends on the text. Alternatives has its own prompt, separate from Rewrite's, so you can edit what kind of variety it looks for in Settings.

A shortcut to bring the toolbar back

The toolbar normally shows up on its own when you select text. But sometimes you've already dismissed it, or the app you're in doesn't trigger it, and you just want it back.

Ctrl+Shift+Space does that. It doesn't run an action, it just opens the toolbar for whatever you have selected.

Once it's open, each button shows a number, matching the order your toolbar is arranged in, so you can press that instead of clicking. This shortcut can't be remapped, on purpose: every other one can, but this is the one way back to Edyt you can always count on.

Reading text you can't select

Some text isn't really text to your Mac. PDFs, screenshots, a photo of a whiteboard, someone's screen during a call: your cursor can't select any of it, because there's nothing to select. It's just pixels.

Hold Alt and drag over it anyway. A live rectangle traces exactly what you're capturing, then Edyt reads it right on your Mac and hands it to the same toolbar a normal selection would: explain it, translate it, run a prompt on it, whatever you'd do with selectable text.

Say a teammate sends a screenshot of an error dialog you don't recognize. Instead of retyping it into a search bar, drag over it and hit Explain.

This runs on-device with Apple's own text recognition. The image never leaves your Mac, and nothing is captured unless you drag.

Try it

Next time a rewrite is almost right but not quite, run Alternatives and see the other options. If you ever need to read something you can't select, Alt-drag over it. And if the toolbar isn't where you expect it, Ctrl+Shift+Space brings it back.