Mathy

A macOS menu bar app that captures math equations from your screen and converts them to LaTeX.

Mathy uses pix2tex/LaTeX-OCR to recognize math equations in screen captures and convert them to LaTeX code. It runs entirely on your machine — no cloud services, no API keys.

How It Works

  1. Press Cmd+Shift+M (configurable)
  2. Draw a rectangle around a math equation on screen
  3. LaTeX is copied to your clipboard instantly

Under the hood, Mathy is two components working together:

  • Mathy.app (Swift/SwiftUI) — a menu bar app that handles screen capture, hotkeys, clipboard, and preview UI
  • mathy-server (Python/FastAPI) — a local HTTP server wrapping pix2tex for OCR inference

The app keeps the Python server running in the background with the OCR model loaded in memory. After the initial ~15s model load, each conversion takes only ~100-300ms.

  • Getting Started — install, requirements, and usage
  • Architecture — how the capture pipeline, app lifecycle, and concurrency work
  • Components — detailed docs for each subsystem
  • Development — build from source, project structure, and dependencies