The guide: everything it does.

The complete feature list · so you know exactly what you're getting

Charmling is a $14.99 Mac menu bar app: a hand-crafted lucky charm on a real elastic cord, a small toolbelt of utilities, and a private on-device AI that can remember your day. This page is the whole app, feature by feature, shortcut by shortcut. If it isn't on this page, it isn't in the app — and everything marked beta is early by honest admission, shipped off by default, and improving with every release.

The charm

Ninety-nine charms, each a real object somebody somewhere hangs for luck — a Drishti Bomma from Telugu India, a Gōtoku-ji beckoning cat, a Daruma, a four-leaf clover — each with its origin story written into the app. Pick from categorised shelves or search the whole collection with artwork visible. The hundredth charm is yours: any emoji, or your own photo cut out and set in a gold locket on your Mac (how that works).

The cord is real physics. Grab the charm and pull — the cord stretches, goes taut and snaps back. Quick-click to flick it, drag to throw it. Every charm has its own ritual — change the Drishti's war paint, ring the Zhaocai bell, loose the bull — one click, with sparkles.

Appearance: three sizes, four positions (under its menu bar icon, left, centre, right) plus custom — hold ⌥ and drag the charm anywhere. Four cord lengths, short to extra long. Hide Charm tucks it away without quitting; Click-Through Mode makes it untouchable so it never eats a click meant for the window behind it (⌘-click still works).

Wander Mode snips the cord and lets the charm roam your desktop. Play holds the fidget toys: Flick, Bless (sparkles on demand), Cat-Toy Mode (it chases your cursor), and the sound toggle.

The Garden

Two charms are alive. The bonsai grows from seed to flower through six carved stages; the dragon hatches from its egg through five. Real days pass between stages — you water or tend roughly twice a day, and the charm shows its thirst on its face. Miss a week and growth simply pauses; they never die, never run away, and are never sold to you twice. A quiet chime (optional) tells you when one needs something, and a 30-second preview plays a whole life if you want to see where it's going.

The toolbelt

📸 Screenshot

Area Screenshot (⌃⌥S) — select a region; it saves to Pictures → Charmling Shots and lands on your clipboard ready to paste. Slingshot Takes a Screenshot makes flinging the charm capture one — the most satisfying way to take a screenshot on any platform.

Text Grab (⌃⌥T) — select a region and the words in it are copied, not the pixels. Text in an image, a slide on a video call, an error dialog, a PDF that won't let you select — on-device OCR reads it and puts it on your clipboard. The picture only ever exists in a temporary file that's deleted the moment it's read.

⏳ Focus Timer

15, 25 or 45 minutes (⌃⌥F starts 25, or stops the session that's running). The cord winds visibly shorter as the minutes pass; the menu bar shows the countdown. Finish and you get confetti and a break notification. A session even survives quitting the app — relaunch and it resumes where it left off.

Presence & wellbeing

Stay Active (⌃⌥G) keeps you green on Teams and Slack while you read something on paper, think, or take a call. Keep Mac Awake (⌃⌥K) holds your Mac open through a long render, download or install — fireflies drift around the charm while it's holding the lights on. Stretch Break taps you on the shoulder every 45 minutes. Each is one click (or one shortcut) on, same off.

🧲 The Shelf

Drop files on the charm and they hang in a woven basket under it — a parking spot for the attachments, screenshots and downloads of right now. Drag them out when you need them, or empty the shelf in one click.

The assistantbeta · needs Apple Intelligence

⌘-click the charm (or press ⌃⌥A anywhere) and a small panel drops beside it. The AI is Apple's on-device model — no account, no API key, no cloud, and it works on a plane. Ask it anything; ask it about your day and it answers from Day Memory (below). Agent Actions turn "remind me to call Sam tomorrow 9am" into a real Reminder and "block 30 minutes after lunch" into a real calendar event — and every action shows you exactly what it wants to do first. Do It or Cancel. You are always the final word.

🧠 Day MemoryBonus · in beta · Pro

The headline feature, and the most carefully built. Switched on, your Mac finally remembers your day — privately, and it forgets on purpose. Every four minutes it looks at your screen, keeps only the text, deletes the image immediately, and erases everything after 48 hours. It all lives in one plain-text file on your Mac that you can open, read and delete yourself. Nothing ever leaves the machine (the proof · how it works in detail).

What it will not record, ever: bodies of mail and chat apps — Gmail, Outlook, Slack, Teams, WhatsApp and the rest, native or in a browser tab — because other people's words are not your work; password managers and anything that looks like one; a built-in never-store list of adult sites; and anything while Private Mode is on. Numbers that look like cards, IBANs or secrets are redacted at the door.

Then just ask:

• Recap — what your day actually looked like, hour by hour.
• Standup — a paste-ready update, written from what was really on your screen. "Yesterday" works on Monday mornings too, thanks to the diary.
• Timesheet — measured blocks of time with honest totals, working-hours aware (9–6 weekdays by default, night shifts supported, "count every hour" if you'd rather). Every line is checked against the evidence so it never invents a client or project.
• Quiz Me students — four questions on what you studied today, drawn only from material you actually read, only when there's enough of it to quiz fairly.
• Study Log students — an hour-by-hour record of what you covered, with honest study-time totals that don't count your scrolling.

Forgetting is granular: the last hour, everything from one app, or everything now — plus the timed Private for the Next Hour that switches itself back. The optional Diary (off by default) keeps one line per day — times, app names, window titles, one sentence — for 7 or 30 days, so "what did I do last Tuesday?" has an answer after the raw record is gone. Never any screen text; that still erases at 48 hours, as it always has.

The watchersbeta · each off by default · Pro

📅 Meeting Radar — the charm jingles about five minutes before each calendar event with an AI prep note built from the invite: purpose, what to have ready, one useful question — plus the join link pulled out of the invite so you're one click from the call. It skips meetings you declined and events that were cancelled, and if your Mac was asleep it still tells you about the meeting that just started. Read-only calendar access, on-device.

🎯 Focus Guardian — during a Focus session, a glance every three minutes checks you're still on the thing you started. Drift to social media and the charm tugs its cord: eyes on the prize. It stays silent during calls, and nothing it sees is stored.

⚡️ Sprint Quiz — finish a Focus session and get three quick questions on what you just studied, even if you stopped the timer early because you finished the chapter.

📋 Clipboard Sense — copy a long article and the charm offers to summarise it; copy something in another language and it offers to translate. One ⌘-click. It reacts only to a fresh copy, ignores anything a password manager marks concealed, and the offer quietly expires if you ignore it.

Privacy, in one place

Private Mode (⌃⌥P) pauses every capture in the app instantly — memory, guardian, quizzes, clipboard, all of it — and the timed variant lasts exactly an hour. Every AI and screen feature ships off and is opted into individually, with a plain-English explanation before macOS asks for any permission. No accounts, no analytics, no tracking, no cloud. The memory file excludes itself from Time Machine so backups can't outlive the 48-hour promise. The whole story, with receipts: charmling.app/privacy.

Every shortcut

Global shortcuts work anywhere in macOS while Charmling is running — no clicking the charm first, no permission prompts. If a combo ever fights with another tool, the ⌨️ Shortcuts menu has one switch to turn the global set off.

With the menu open, single keys work as accelerators too: ⌘R ritual, ⌘A assistant, ⌘S screenshot, ⌘T text grab, ⌘W wander, ⌘F flick, ⌘B bless, ⌘H hide, ⌘P private, ⌘Q quit.

The practical part

$14.99, once. One Mac, no subscription, free updates. The charm, the physics, the rituals, the Garden, Wander Mode, the Focus Timer, the Shelf and the screenshot tools are all complete without any AI — those work on macOS 13+. Screen-reading features need macOS 14+; the assistant and everything under Day Memory need Apple Intelligence (Apple silicon). Notarized by Apple, licence key in your inbox within a minute, 7-day no-questions refund — the refund is the trial.

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