Ghostbar

By Gus Dantas, ghostavo.com.

One assistant for the Mac, the one I carry to every machine. It lives in the menu bar and does the small jobs that otherwise take five separate apps:

• Dictation in any app. Hold a key and talk. A small panel shows the words as they come, and you can type into it while you speak. At each pause a second, more accurate model hears that stretch again and replaces it, unless you edited it. Enter pastes; ⌘Enter proofreads first. English and Portuguese, mixed if you like, all on the Mac.
• Cast. Screen or one window, with your face in a round bubble, 16:9 or 9:16 with a smooth crop you steer, a teleprompter, pause and resume. Recorded natively (ScreenCaptureKit, Core Image, AVAssetWriter), so the file is ready the moment you stop.
• Screenshots of an area, a window or the screen, straight to the clipboard, with a card in the corner to copy, edit, show in Finder, bin (with an undo) or drag into any app.
• Text from the screen. Drag over text and it is copied. A table pastes into Excel or Outlook as a table (Vision's document reader on macOS 26).
• A library of every capture and dictation, grouped by day, searchable by name, by the app it came from, by the text inside a screenshot and by what you said.
• Mac switches: keep Teams available while you are away (a one pixel nudge, only when idle), stay awake with the lid closed, and an optional VPN that exits in a country you pick.

Everything runs locally. Nothing leaves the Mac unless you add an Anthropic key for proofreading (the dictated text is then sent to Claude) or set up the VPN (your own cloud server).

Build it

You need macOS 15 or later on Apple silicon, Xcode, Rust and Bun.

bun install
bun run tauri build

scripts/install-mac.sh builds, signs the app ad hoc with a requirement that keeps macOS's privacy approvals across rebuilds, and installs it in /Applications.

On first launch macOS asks for the microphone, Accessibility (to paste), Screen Recording (for screenshots and Cast) and the camera (for Cast's bubble).

Set it up

• Speech models. Settings › Speech models. A streaming model gives the live text (Nemotron 3.5 ASR streaming); Cohere Transcribe, if downloaded, does the second pass.
• Proofreading. Add an Anthropic key in Settings › Dictation to proofread with Claude Haiku; without one, Apple Intelligence does it. The instructions are src-tauri/src/proofread_prompt.txt. To use your own, put a proofread_prompt.txt in ~/Library/Application Support/com.gusdantas.assistant/. Custom Words are added as names to spell exactly.
• Awake with the lid closed needs a one time sudo rule that allows exactly pmset -a disablesleep 0|1 and nothing else: sudo ./scripts/install-lid-rule.sh.
• VPN (optional) needs your own Google Cloud project, a Cloudflare zone and the WireGuard app. See docs/vpn.md.
• Chrome. A companion extension (separate) records tabs and full pages and shares the library through Chrome's native messaging. The app works without it.

Look

The colours, type and mark follow ghostavo.com. The mark is a single tile: a quarter of a cut avocado (rind, light teal flesh) whose orange stone is also an eye, drawn on a 100-unit grid. Teal marks the selection and the one main action, orange is only for a recording, IBM Plex Mono is for small labels. Every version of the mark, the app icon and the menu bar glyphs come from design/mark/make_mark.py.

Credits

Speech runs on transcribe.cpp and ggml; icons are Lucide (ISC); IBM Plex Mono is under the SIL Open Font Licence (src/assets/fonts/OFL.txt).

Shortcuts stop working (Secure Input)

While a password field or a terminal with Secure Keyboard Entry is focused, macOS hides key presses from every other app, so the shortcuts pause. The menu bar icon shows a warning badge while that lasts. Leave the password field, or turn off Secure Keyboard Entry in the terminal, and the shortcuts come back.

Licence: MIT, see LICENSE.