Mac how-to

Copy text from YouTube
on your Mac.

Code in a tutorial, a command in a terminal recording, a quote on a slide. You can’t select text in a video, but you can still copy it. Here’s how, from free to fastest.

Updated October 2026 · 5 min read

There are two kinds of text in a YouTube video, and they need different tools. Spoken words live in the audio. On-screen text, like code, terminal output, slide bullets and burned-in captions, is part of the picture. This guide is mostly about the second kind, but let’s get the first out of the way.

If you want what was said: use the transcript

Many videos have a transcript. Open the description under the video and look for Show transcript. It gives you every spoken line with timestamps, and you can select and copy it like any web page. No OCR needed. It won’t include anything that was only shown on screen, which is usually the part you actually wanted.

First, freeze a clean frame

For on-screen text, everything starts with a sharp frame:

  • Pause on the right moment. While paused, the , and . keys step back and forward one frame, which helps when text is mid-scroll or fading in.
  • Set the quality to the highest option. At low resolutions, small code turns to mush and no OCR can fix that.
  • Make it big. Theatre mode or full screen gives each character more pixels.
  • Move the pointer away so the progress bar and title overlay aren’t covering the text.

The free way: screenshot, then Live Text

  1. Press ⌃ ⇧ ⌘ 4 and drag over the text. With Control held, the screenshot goes to the clipboard instead of your desktop.
  2. Open Preview and choose File → New from Clipboard.
  3. Drag across the text, Control-click it and choose Copy Text. If nothing selects, turn on Tools → Text Selection.
  4. Paste into your editor or notes.

It costs nothing and it works. It’s also a context switch every time you want one line of code.

The fast way: Snatch

Snatch reads whatever is on your screen, so a paused YouTube frame is no different from a document.

  1. Pause the video on a clean frame.
  2. Press ⌘ ⇧ 2 and drag over the code or text.
  3. Let go, switch to your editor, and paste.
A paused tutorial on the left, the pasted code in the editor on the right.

You can watch this play out, along with five other everyday cases, in the scenes on the home page.

If you’re working through a long tutorial, every capture also lands in Snatch’s searchable history. Grab each snippet as the video goes, then paste them in order when you’re done.

Getting code out cleanly

  • Keep line breaks on for code, so each line stays a line. Turn it off for prose, so a paragraph pastes as one block.
  • Use accurate mode for small fonts and dense code. Fast mode is fine for slide headlines.
  • Watch for look-alikes. 0 and O, 1 and l, straight and curly quotes. Your editor’s linter usually points straight at them.
  • Indentation may need a tidy. OCR sees characters, not tabs. Run your formatter after pasting.
  • Capture in chunks. Two or three short captures are easier to check than one huge one.

A couple of honest notes

  • Use it like notes. Copying a snippet to learn from or build on is what tutorials are for. Republishing someone’s course material isn’t.
  • Screen Recording permission. macOS requires it for any app that reads the screen. Snatch reads only the area you drag over, at the moment you let go, and recognition happens on your Mac.

Which should you use?

For what someone said, the transcript. For the occasional frame, the screenshot and Preview route. If you learn from video every week, a single shortcut saves you a lot of retyping and a lot of typos. Snatch is a one-time $5.99 with a 14-day money-back guarantee.

Copy text from anywhere.
One shortcut.

Snatch is a menu bar app for macOS Sonoma and later. One-time $5.99, on-device, with a 14-day money-back guarantee.

Buy Snatch · $5.99

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