Ever wished you could fix a clunky sentence in Slack, polish a sermon outline in your notes app, or translate a church announcement — all without leaving the app you're already in? RewriteBar is a lightweight macOS menu bar tool that does exactly that. Select any text in any application, trigger a keyboard shortcut, and choose from AI-powered actions like grammar correction, tone adjustment, translation into 500+ languages, text expansion, and summarization.^1
Built by indie developer Mathias Michel and founded in 2024,^1 RewriteBar has grown into a comprehensive AI writing toolkit supporting 38 cloud and local AI providers — including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, DeepSeek, and local models through Ollama, LM Studio, and Apple Intelligence for complete privacy.^1 You can create custom actions tailored to your workflow, like reformatting sermon notes, generating discussion questions, or translating content for a multilingual congregation.^1
Pastors and church communicators will appreciate how RewriteBar fits into their existing workflow. Whether you're drafting emails to volunteers, polishing a blog post, or adjusting the tone of a social media update, it works inside the apps you already use — Google Docs, Microsoft Word, Slack, Notion, and more.^1 The toolkit keeps evolving with follow-up actions, session history, side-by-side comparison view, the ability to accept or reject individual changes in the word-by-word review, an edit-input mode for refining text directly in the review window, a Labs option that keeps formatting such as links, lists, headings, and code intact when formatted text is rewritten, intelligent provider/model fallback when a model is unavailable, selectable thinking modes that show the model's reasoning as it works, the ability to attach screenshots or images as extra context, Apple Shortcuts integration, command categorization with custom icons, and accessibility improvements like VoiceOver support — useful for inclusive church communication.^3 The app also has a dedicated Faith & Church use case page with sermon polishing examples, announcement templates, and multilingual outreach workflows.^7
Why People Love It"RewriteBar - how could I live without it?" — Reddit user alvinator360^4
Notable- Featured on Product Hunt, where RewriteBar v2 launched in November 2025^5
- Actively maintained with a steady cadence of updates since its April 2024 beta — including per-change review controls and formatting preservation, macOS 27 support, the oMLX local provider, Ollama vision support, thinking-mode controls, image and screenshot context, accessibility work, command categorization, per-language keyboard shortcuts, an edit-input mode, and a Swift 6.0 codebase refresh^3
- Offers one-time purchase licensing (no subscription required) with a free trial, plus a refund-up-to-100% creator demo program^2
- Supports local AI models including Apple Intelligence for users who prioritize data privacy^1
- Available via Homebrew install (brew install --cask rewritebar)^6
- Publishes growing writing guides and use-case resources on its site, including a faith-and-church workflow guide^7
- macOS only (13.0 Ventura or later); no Windows or mobile version planned^2
