Break time remaining – 9:41
← this floats over everything, and it's ticking

TextAdder

A macOS menu bar app that floats persistent, styled text above every window — lower-thirds, break timers, and quick phrases for screen sharing, teaching, and live demos.

View on GitHub Install

Why it exists

Annotation tools like DemoPro, DrawPen, or ZoomIt are great at ephemeral marks — draw an arrow, it fades, move on. TextAdder covers the other half: text you compose once and leave standing. A session title over your Chrome window. A "Q&A time" banner. A break countdown your audience watches tick down. Labels survive app switches, follow you across Spaces, float over full-screen apps, and never steal keyboard focus.

Features

Multiple labels

Independent overlays, each with its own text, style, position, and display. Multi-line, live-updating as you type.

Full styling

Any installed font, 12–200 pt, bold, text color, letter-outline border, drop shadow, background box, opacity.

Style presets

Save named looks ("Yellow callout", "Red warning") and apply them to any label in one click.

Countdown timers

Write Break time remaining - 10:00 and press Start — only the time ticks. Press and hold the overlay for 2 seconds to pause; a "Paused" pill appears beside it.

Phrase library

Saved phrases and your 10 most recent texts, one click to swap. A global hotkey cycles phrases from any app.

Placement tools

Drag anywhere, snap grid + lower-third button, nudge hotkeys, corner grip to resize, multi-monitor picker.

Presenter-safe

Click-through lock, master show/hide with fade (hotkey or right-click the menu bar icon), auto-hide after N seconds.

Keystroke display

Optional KeyCastr-style pill showing what you type (needs Accessibility permission).

Default hotkeys

Keys	Action
`⌃⌥T`	Show / hide all overlays (fades)
`⌃⌥P`	Swap the selected label to the next saved phrase
`⌃⌥` + arrows	Nudge the selected label by 10 px

The first two are re-recordable in the app, so they can coexist with whatever your other tools claim.

Install

Easiest: download TextAdder.dmg from the latest release, open it, and drag TextAdder to Applications. The app is ad-hoc signed, so the first launch needs a right-click → Open to get past Gatekeeper.

Or build from source:

git clone https://github.com/ismayc/text-adder.git
cd text-adder
./make-app.sh          # builds TextAdder.app (or ./make-dmg.sh for a DMG)
open TextAdder.app     # or move it to /Applications first

Requires macOS 13+ and the Swift toolchain (Xcode or Command Line Tools). The app lives in the menu bar — click the text-box icon for the control panel, right-click it to hide everything at once.

Developing without Xcode? ./run-tests.sh runs the test suite with Command Line Tools alone by pointing SwiftPM at the CLT's bundled Swift Testing framework.