JustNow
You just closed that window.
Now get it back.
JustNow is a tiny macOS menu bar app that quietly screenshots your screen every few seconds, so you can rewind to what you were just looking at. Drag over any frame to grab text straight to your clipboard. That's basically it.
Free and open source. Requires macOS 15+. Signed and notarised.
Why this exists
Rewind.ai was great at this job, then got acquired and pivoted to AI. All I really wanted was a way to scroll back a few minutes and copy that thing I accidentally closed — no AI summaries, no cloud sync, no subscription. So I built this.
What it does
Hotkey rewind
Press ⌘⌥J to open a fullscreen timeline of your recent screen history. Scrub backwards with arrow keys, scroll, or click. Press Escape to dismiss.
Drag-to-grab text
See something you want in a frame? Drag over it. JustNow runs OCR on the selection and copies cleaned-up text straight to your clipboard. Handy for URLs, error messages, or that one-time code you let disappear.
Smart capture
Perceptual hashing skips duplicate frames, so a static screen doesn't waste storage. Configurable history from 30 minutes up to 24 hours, with tiered compaction keeping recent frames at full detail.
Battery-aware
On battery or under thermal pressure, capture frequency and resolution scale down automatically. At low battery, background OCR pauses entirely. It tries not to be the reason your fans spin up.
Local and private
Everything stays in
~/Library/Application Support/JustNow/.
No cloud, no network calls, no telemetry. One-click "clear all
history" in Settings if you want a fresh start.
No purple dot
Uses one-shot ScreenCaptureKit screenshots instead of a continuous stream, so you don't get the persistent purple screen-sharing indicator in your menu bar.
Details
- Price
- Free, forever
- Requirements
- macOS 15 (Sequoia) or later
- Permissions
- Screen Recording (the only one)
- Updates
- Built-in via Sparkle; checks automatically
- Licence
- Open source on GitHub
- Hotkey
- Fully configurable (default ⌘⌥J)