Overpane, by Anvu · macOS 13+
The pane they can’t see.
Overpane reads what is on your screen with on-device OCR and answers in a floating panel. Eight chords, each one keystroke away. It drives the AI CLI you already pay for, or our hosted inference.
Your notes and your prompts are meant to stay out of a shared stream or a screenshot — and the app ships a check so you can measure that yourself.
Real footage
A chord pressed, the panel answering.
Demo — 40 seconds
A recording of a chord being pressed and the panel answering. Not yet published.
Verify
Prove it before the meeting.
Press the chord. The panel flashes magenta, then the check captures through three separate methods and looks for that magenta in each — and reports plainly what it found. Watch it here, then run it on your own machine.
Methods
- ScreenCaptureKitabsent
- window-listabsent
- screencaptureabsent
- ScreenCaptureKitpresent
- window-listabsent
- screencaptureabsent
- ScreenCaptureKitabsent
- window-listabsent
- screencapturenot measured
Verdict
PASS — all three captures measured, panel absent from every one.
FAIL — measured, and the panel was present.
COULD NOT MEASURE — nothing was read, so nothing is claimed. Treat it like a FAIL.
VERIFY writes the evidence frames to disk so you can look with your own eyes rather than trusting the verdict. It reports COULD NOT MEASURE, never PASS, whenever it did not actually read the pixels.
Screen sharing
Your notes, out of the shared stream.
When you share your screen, the people watching should see your work, not the private notes you keep beside it. Overpane asks macOS to keep its own panel out of screen captures — every window it owns, re-asserted every two seconds in case anything resets it — for the same reason a password manager keeps itself out of a screen recording.
Whether macOS honours that request depends on the release you are running and on how the capturing application asks for the screen. We are not going to tell you it always works. Instead the app ships VERIFY: press ⌃⌥⌘V and it runs three different capture methods against its own panel and tells you what it found.
VERIFY runs three capture methods — the ScreenCaptureKit path Zoom, Meet and Teams use, a second ScreenCaptureKit construction built from the window list, and the system screenshot tool behind ⌘⇧3 — and reports PASS only if all three are clean. It reports COULD NOT MEASURE rather than PASS whenever it did not actually read the panel’s pixels, because silence and success are different results.
- PASS
- all three captures measured, panel absent from every one
- FAIL
- measured, and the panel was present
- COULD NOT MEASURE
- nothing was read; nothing is claimed
This is a confidentiality feature and its scope is exactly that: what a shared stream or a screenshot contains. It says nothing about what other software on your machine can observe, and it is no substitute for telling people you are using an assistant where you are expected to. Our acceptable use policy sets out where it must not be relied on.
Eight actions
One chord. One answer, in the shape you needed.
Every chord is ⌃⌥⌘ plus one key, and every action is also in the menu bar. Snippets below are illustrative — the shape, not a captured result.
- ⌃⌥⌘A
Answer
One sentence you can say out loud.
Commit to the p99 you published, then bound the ask to it.
All tiers
- ⌃⌥⌘S
Summarize
Three things you need to know.
Q3 board deck · 14 slides · the ask is on slide 9.
All tiers
- ⌃⌥⌘J
Code
The problem solved in reviewable Java.
Two-heap median · O(log n) insert, O(1) read · Java 17.
All tiers
- ⌃⌥⌘D
HLD
System design, with real numbers.
Write-heavy · shard by tenant · async fan-out · ~12k rps.
Connect and Pro
- ⌃⌥⌘L
LLD
Class design at the level of signatures.
interface RateLimiter { boolean tryAcquire(String key); }
Connect and Pro
- ⌃⌥⌘E
Review
Code review, worst finding first.
Bug first — line 42 dereferences before the null check.
Connect and Pro
- ⌃⌥⌘K
Capture
For a problem longer than one viewport.
Added screen 3 to the set · expires in 10:00.
Lite, Connect, and Pro
- ⌃⌥⌘V
VERIFY
Check it yourself, on your machine.
PASS — panel absent from all three captures.
Connect and Pro
How it works
Three steps, then you never touch the mouse.
01
Install it and grant two permissions
Screen Recording, so it can read the screen at all. Accessibility, so the chord’s modifier keys are handled by the app and not by whatever is in front. The app tells you on its own status screen which path is live.
02
Point it at an agent
If the `claude`, `codex`, or `gemini` CLI is on your PATH, Overpane finds it and uses it — you are already paying for that subscription. If you would rather not run one, use our hosted inference instead.
03
Press a chord
Control, Option, Command and one key. On-device OCR reads the screen, the answer is rendered in the floating panel, and you never move the pointer. Every action also has a menu bar item, and every action has a chord.
Privacy
Claims, each with the mechanism behind it.
Four things stated plainly — and one line each on how they hold. The full promise-by-promise account, and what you would notice if any broke, is on the security page.
On-device OCR
The image of your screen never leaves your machine.
↳ OCR runs locally on the macOS Vision framework; only the extracted text is handed on.
Text goes where you point it
On bring-your-own tiers the text never touches our servers.
↳ It goes to your own AI CLI and wherever your provider sends it — the app does not report to us.
Nothing left on disk
What the app writes is gone when it exits.
↳ One private folder at mode 0700, deleted on every exit path — force-quit and kill included.
No telemetry on BYO
The bring-your-own build does not phone home.
↳ It cannot see your screen and cannot tell what app you use it over — the acceptable use policy says so.
The 90-second tour
See it end to end.
Narrated by our AI presenter — a brand illustration, not a customer. It walks the panel, the chords, and the check, and claims nothing the rest of this page does not.
Tour — 90 seconds
Narrated by our AI presenter, a brand illustration. Click to play once published. Not yet recorded.
FAQ
Questions people actually ask.
Which AI does it use?
Whichever you point it at. On the bring-your-own tier it drives the AI CLI already on your PATH — Claude Code, Codex, or Gemini — using the subscription you already pay for. On the hosted tiers it calls our inference instead. You can override the model with an environment variable without recompiling.
Does my screen leave my machine?
The screenshot never does. OCR runs on-device using the macOS Vision framework, and only the extracted text is handed to an agent. On the bring-your-own tier that text goes wherever your own provider sends it and never touches our servers. On the hosted tiers it goes to our inference provider. Both paths are stated plainly rather than hedged.
What does it write to disk?
A plain-text copy of the screen text and, briefly, a screenshot — both inside one private folder created at mode 0700 with the process umask set before anything else runs. Every one of them is deleted when the app exits, including when it is force-quit or killed. The app sweeps the folder again at launch in case a previous run was terminated.
Is there a Windows version?
Not yet. Overpane is macOS only today. Windows is planned but not built, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Leave your address on the download page and we will write to you when there is something real to install.
Are there uses you prohibit?
Yes, and they are set out plainly in our acceptable use policy rather than buried. Overpane is built for live meetings, coding and debugging, design work, and practice on your own. Where an organisation’s rules conflict with anything we say, their rules win — and if you are unsure whether assistance is permitted, ask them, not us.
Do you collect telemetry?
On the bring-your-own tier the application does not report to us at all. We cannot see what is on your screen and cannot tell what application you are using it over. That is also the honest limit of what we can enforce, and our acceptable use policy says so in as many words.
A note from the founder
I built Overpane because I wanted a panel I could keep beside my own work without wondering what it was doing behind my back. So everything runs on your machine, the screen text goes only where you point it, and the one privacy claim is one you can measure yourself — that is what VERIFY is for.
If something here reads as overstated, tell me plainly and I will fix the wording or the code. I would rather hear it than not.
A pane you can keep beside your work.
Free forever on your own agent. Verify it yourself before you rely on it.