Rewrite Any Text on Mac with a Keyboard Shortcut

Most macOS users want one thing from AI: highlight some text, press a key, get a better version back. No prompt window, no separate app, no chat history. Just rewrite this thing I just wrote.

Apple Intelligence partially solves this with Writing Tools. The catch: it is gated to recent hardware (M-series with enough RAM), recent macOS versions, and a specific set of supported actions. If you are on an older Mac or want broader control over what the AI does, you need a different tool.

TypeFire is one. It binds AI rewrites to keyboard shortcuts that work in any app on any Mac running macOS 12 or later. This post is the practical setup guide.

How the shortcut works

You have a snippet whose body is {{ai:rewrite}}. The snippet has a global keyboard shortcut assigned to it (anything you pick: Cmd+Ctrl+R, Cmd+Shift+W, etc.).

You highlight some text in any app. You press your shortcut. TypeFire reads your selection, sends it to your chosen AI provider, and replaces the selection with the rewritten version when the response comes back. The whole roundtrip takes one to three seconds.

Same pattern works for any AI action, not just rewriting:

• {{ai:summarize}} to compress a long block
• {{ai:translate:fr}} to switch languages in place
• {{ai:fix}} to clean only grammar and spelling
• {{ai:expand}} to grow a brief note into a full paragraph

You assign a different shortcut to each, or you keep one shortcut for your most-used action and trigger the rest via abbreviation.

Setup that takes longer to read than to do

1. Install TypeFire from typefire.app. It is free, native, signed.
2. Pick a provider in Settings, AI tab. Three options: Claude, OpenAI, Gemini. If you want to try this without any payment, pick Gemini (free tier with daily quotas, no payment method needed). If you want top-quality rewrites, Claude or OpenAI ($5 of credits buys thousands of rewrites).
3. Paste your API key, click Test, confirm green dot.
4. Create a snippet. Title: "Rewrite". Body: {{ai:rewrite}}. Save.
5. Assign a shortcut. In the snippet's Insert Body field, click and press your chosen key combination. TypeFire registers it globally.
6. Try it. Open Mail, Notes, Slack, whatever. Highlight a sentence you wrote. Press your shortcut. The rewritten version replaces your highlight.

The shortcut works system-wide. There is no per-app configuration.

Apple Intelligence comparison

Apple Intelligence Writing Tools is the closest first-party equivalent. Worth comparing honestly.

Where Apple Intelligence wins: No setup. No API key. Free, with no usage limits. Privacy is on-device for most actions, with optional Private Cloud Compute for harder ones. If you have an Apple Silicon Mac with enough RAM and a recent macOS version, it just works.

Where TypeFire's AI tokens win: Works on older Macs (anything macOS 12+, Intel or Apple Silicon). Lets you pick the underlying model (GPT-4o vs Claude Sonnet vs Gemini Pro produce different output qualities). Lets you write custom prompts beyond the fixed Writing Tools menu. Works in every app uniformly, including ones where Writing Tools UI is partially or fully missing. And the same engine drives summarize, translate, fix, expand, custom prompts, not just rewrite.

The real answer is most users will use both. Writing Tools for the simple cases. TypeFire for cases where you want a specific model or a custom prompt. They do not conflict.

Useful keyboard shortcuts to set up

A starter pack worth copying:

You will not need all of these. Most people land on two or three that cover their actual workflow.

Where this saves the most time

The rewrite-on-shortcut pattern compounds where:

• You write a lot of short messages and want them better-formed before sending (Slack, Mail, customer support).
• You work in multiple languages and need to flip text between them quickly.
• You take rough notes and want them tidied up before sharing.
• You write code comments and want them clearer without leaving the editor.
• You collaborate on docs where casual notes need promoting to formal copy.

If your daily writing volume is low or you prefer doing your own editing, the value is smaller. The feature still works, but the time saved per use is small.

Privacy posture

Your API key sits locally on your Mac, in TypeFire's config file. Every AI call goes directly from your Mac to the provider you picked. TypeFire's own servers see nothing about the request, the input text, or the response. Anonymous Aptabase telemetry counts how often expansions fire (no content, no userId beyond your email), and you can disable that in Settings.

How to start

Download TypeFire, set up one snippet with {{ai:rewrite}} and a shortcut, try it on your next outgoing message. The setup is shorter than the time to read this paragraph.

For the no-cost path with Gemini, see Free AI Text Expander for Mac. For the OpenAI flow, see Run ChatGPT in Any Mac App.