Introducing Edyt: AI, right where you write

The AI got good. Using it didn't.

Over the last few years the models have become genuinely great at the small, constant work of writing: tightening an email, untangling a dense paragraph, translating a message so the meaning actually survives.

And yet the way most of us reach for that help hasn't changed since the first chatbot: copy the text, find the browser tab, paste, wait, read, copy the result, switch back, paste again. One sentence at a time, all day long. It's a tiny tax on every thought, and you pay it in focus.

We built Edyt to delete that tax.

What Edyt is

Edyt is a lightweight macOS app that puts AI inside the apps you already write in. Select text anywhere, whether it's your email, a Google Doc, Slack, Notion, a code comment, or a form on some internal tool. Press a shortcut, and the result lands right where your cursor is.

No window to open. No tab to hunt for. No paste. Three steps, and they never change:

Select. Shortcut. Done.

Four actions, a keystroke away

Each action has its own shortcut, and every one of them is remappable to whatever feels natural under your fingers.

• Rewrite (Ctrl+Shift+C): your instant polish button. Fix tone, grammar, and clarity, or do a full rewrite, in place. No panel, no copy-paste.
• Explain (Ctrl+Shift+E): select anything you don't follow (jargon, a dense clause, an unfamiliar concept) and get it in plain language. Ask follow-up questions right in the panel until it clicks.
• Translate (Ctrl+Shift+T): context-aware translation that keeps the formatting and the nuance. Switch languages on the fly; refine with a quick follow-up.
• Custom Prompts (Ctrl+Shift+J): your whole prompt library, opened from anywhere. Build a tone guide, a formatter, a specialized rewrite once, and run it across every app on your Mac.

And because the everyday rewrite should sound like you, there's Your Voice: describe how you write once, and every press of the rewrite shortcut polishes your text in exactly that tone, no prompt to retype.

Edyt has grown since this post went up, with new actions added along the way. See everything it does now

The part that makes it different

Plenty of tools can rewrite a sentence now. What we cared about was where and how the AI shows up. Our whole design rests on one idea:

An AI writing tool should show up where you are, follow your instructions, and then get out of the way.

Measure the usual options against that, and the gaps are obvious:

• A chatbot in a tab is powerful, but it's a destination. You go to it; it never comes to you. And every session, you re-explain how you want to sound.
• Built-in writing tools (the kind baked into macOS) do come to your text, but they hand you a fixed menu: friendly, professional, concise. Useful, until your idea of "professional" isn't theirs. They also only appear in the text fields the operating system controls. The moment you're in Notion, Linear, Figma, or a code editor, they're gone.
• Command palettes are fast, but they still live a launcher away from the words.

Edyt's answer is simple: instead of three preset tones, a text field. Write the instruction once, like "Make it warmer but keep it under 60 words," "Translate to Spanish for a formal client," or "Turn my notes into a tidy changelog." Save it as a prompt, and trigger it by shortcut in any editable field on your Mac. Edyt reads the selection itself, so it doesn't wait for an app to offer a menu.

Built to be trusted

A tool that can read your selection and type on your behalf needs real access. On macOS, that means Accessibility and Input Monitoring, and if you want Edyt to read text from PDFs and pictures, Screen Recording too. That's not a small thing to grant, and we won't pretend it is. So trust isn't a footnote here; it's a design constraint:

• Detection runs on your device. Text detection happens locally on your Mac. Screen reading takes one picture of the area you drag and reads it locally too. No keystrokes, images, or screen recordings ever leave your device.
• We don't store your text. The text you act on is sent over an encrypted connection, processed in real time, and discarded the moment you have your result. It never reaches a database or a log on our side.
• It isn't training data. Processing runs through the OpenAI API, which doesn't train on it. Your words stay yours.
• Permissions are earned, not demanded. Onboarding explains each permission one at a time, after you've seen what the app does, not before. Screen Recording is only asked for when you first use screen reading, and you can decline it and keep everything else.

The full breakdown lives on our security page.

Free to start

Edyt is free, and not in the trial sense. The free plan comes with a daily, weekly, and monthly token allowance, and asks for no credit card. Write as many of your own prompts as you like. When you outgrow the allowance, Pro lifts the limits for unlimited use across every app.

Try it in the next two minutes

Edyt runs on macOS 12.3 or later, on Apple Silicon and Intel Macs. Download it and the app walks you through the permissions one at a time, explaining each before it asks.

Then don't go looking for Edyt. Go back to whatever you were already writing, and the next time a sentence comes out wrong, reach for the shortcut instead of retyping it. That's the whole idea: not another window to visit, just something that's there when you need it.