You're in a Zoom meeting and a colleague shares their screen. They're walking through a dashboard, showing a configuration file, or demoing an app. On their shared screen you can clearly see URLs, credentials, terminal commands, and data — but the Zoom viewer gives you zero ability to interact with any of it. You can watch, but you can't select. You ask them to paste the link in the chat, they forget, and the meeting moves on.
Screen Shares Are View-Only by Design
When someone shares their screen over Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams, what you see is a video feed of their display. Your cursor doesn't interact with their content. You can't click into their text editor, can't highlight their terminal output, can't right-click their browser tabs. Everything rendered on the shared screen is a moving image from your Mac's perspective.
This is especially painful in technical meetings. A DevOps engineer shows a Kubernetes config. A PM walks through analytics. A designer presents copy on mockups. The text scrolls past, and your options are: ask them to slow down and dictate, furiously type what you can see, or hope the recording captures it clearly enough to revisit later.
Capture Text from Any Shared Screen
Optic treats the Zoom window like any other part of your screen. Activate it from the menu bar, drag a selection over the text visible in the shared screen, and the recognized characters are copied to your clipboard. It works whether the presenter is showing a browser, a terminal, a spreadsheet, or a slide deck.
Technical Meetings
Grab terminal commands, file paths, API endpoints, and config values the moment they appear on the shared screen. No asking the presenter to pause and paste into chat. No retyping from memory after the meeting ends.
Data and Dashboards
When a shared screen shows metrics, KPIs, or tabular data, select the numbers directly. Paste them into your own notes or spreadsheet with the exact values that were displayed.
Capture History as Meeting Notes
Every extraction is saved in Optic's menu bar history. Make multiple captures throughout the meeting and you'll have a timestamped log of every piece of text you grabbed — functioning as precise meeting notes for the content that mattered most.