PTPL 202 · Replacing Setapp: 7 Down, 8 to Go

It was a nice surprise to discover that Shottr can replace two apps!

I’m slowly working my way through the list of the (Mac-only) Setapp apps I’ve used for years, looking for free or one-time purchase alternatives.

Three apps I’ve started testing are Maccy (clipboard manager), Textshot (OCR), and Shottr (screenshots).

Paste → Raycast

My journey to a Paste substitute began with Maccy. It’s a free download or you can support the developer by purchasing it from the App Store. Maccy isn’t as pretty as Paste, but it does everything I need it to — just not all of what I’d like it to.

The additional information Maccy provides about each clipboard item is nice to have, though sometimes the preview enlargements get in the way of browsing the list. This terminal command increases the time you can hover over an item before the preview activates: defaults write org.p0deje.Maccy previewDelay -int 2000

Maccy can’t organise snippets in groups the same way Paste can, which is why I decided to go with Raycast. I’ve been using Raycast for years as a Spotlight replacement, but until recently had not looked into its other functions. And I’ve really been missing out!

The free version of Raycast will replace Paste for me, but I’ll keep Maccy active in the background because Raycast’s free plan throttles the clipboard history at 3 months.

TextSniper → Shottr

I’ve never been a big TextSniper user, even though I had it available on my Setapp subscription. Extracting text from images was never a big enough itch to warrant lifting my hand to scratch it, I suppose.

Textshot does well for basic text extraction, but it’s annoying that it doesn’t remove line breaks the way TextSniper can.

The answer to this one is simpler than I thought it would be: Shottr! Yes, Shottr can OCR text and remove line breaks.

CleanShotX → Shottr

Most of the screenshots I make are done with the Mac ⌃⇧⌘4 shortcut. The rest are generally windows, that I like to see captured with a transparent drop shadow. Both CleanShotX and Shottr can do that. I don’t need CleanShotX’s other features as I’m okay with adding my own backgrounds and annotations, and I’m not interested in their cloud storage.

CleanShotX is a nice tool to use, I like it. If there was no comparable alternative, I would pay the $29 (1-year of updates) to keep using it. Shottr, however, is free to try, cheap to buy, and a good CleanShotX replacement for my needs.

As first mentioned in PTPL 200, these are the Setapp apps I have installed, with their current status:

The Vital column indicates how important this kind of app is to my workflow. 1 for vital, 3 for nice-to-have, 2 in the middle. So far I have resolved seven app categories, determining that I’d buy two of them outright if I no longer had a Setapp subscription.

If you’re still keen to try Setapp despite my attempts to leave them, this link will get you a 30-day free trial instead of the usual 7, and put a small commission into my pocket at no cost to you. Use the code ELLANE

Next to discover: alternatives to Typeface, PDF Squeezer, and Squash.

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