Quick actions for Mac right where you are looking.
Press ⌃⌥ and a small ring opens at your cursor with the four or five things worth doing to what you have selected — no menu to hunt through, no app to switch to.
Halo is a radial quick-action menu for macOS. Select some text or an image, press ⌃⌥, and a ring appears at your cursor offering the actions that fit what you selected — rewrite it, capture it, ask about it, act on it. Unlike a fixed context menu, the options change with the content and the app, and anything captured joins your local brain.
What are quick actions on a Mac?
Quick actions are the small operations you perform on something you have already selected: look it up, copy it somewhere, translate it, tidy it, send it on. macOS has shipped a version of this for a very long time. Right-click gives you a context menu, the Services menu extends it, and Shortcuts and Automator let you add your own entries. It is a genuinely good system, and for stable, repeatable operations it is hard to beat.
The limitation is that a context menu is a list somebody decided on in advance. It grows as apps add to it, it is the same in every situation, and by the time it holds twenty items you are reading rather than choosing. PopClip took the sensible next step by making the actions appear at the selection itself, with a large library of extensions to install, which removes the travel to the menu bar and most of the reading. Both approaches share one assumption: the action you want is a fixed thing you configured earlier.
That assumption holds for "open in browser" and breaks for everything interesting. Most of what you actually want to do with a paragraph depends on what the paragraph is and where you found it. A sentence in a client email, a line of code in an editor, a price in a spreadsheet and a screenshot in Slack all want different things done to them, and none of those things is on a list.
Halo works from the other end. The ring is drawn after it has looked at what you selected and which app you are in, so the options are the ones that make sense at that moment rather than every option that exists. And because Stilou already holds your context, the actions can be about your work — rewrite this in my voice, capture this against the client it mentions, ask what we decided about it last month — rather than generic text operations.
How to use Halo on a Mac
Four steps, and the only one you repeat is the second.
- Install Stilou and grant accessibility accessDownload the app, drag it to Applications, and open it. macOS asks for accessibility permission so Halo can read your selection and type back into the app you are in.
- Select something, anywhereA paragraph in Mail, a sentence in a browser, a block in your editor, a line in a document, an image on screen. Halo works on the selection in the frontmost app rather than on a window of its own.
- Press ⌃⌥The ring opens at your cursor, not at the corner of the screen. It holds the handful of actions that fit what you selected, so your eyes never leave the thing you are working on.
- Pick an actionClick a segment, or keep holding the modifiers and flick the cursor towards it. The result lands in place — text replaced, thought captured, answer shown — and the ring disappears.
Wskazówka. Learn the direction rather than the label. Because the ring always opens under your cursor, the common actions live in the same place on screen every time, and after a day or two you stop reading it and just flick.
Why a ring beats a list
The menu comes to you.
The ring is drawn where you are already looking, in the app you are already in. There is no trip to the menu bar, no palette in the corner of the screen, and nothing to drag your attention off the work.
The options change with what you selected.
Code offers different actions than a client email, and a screenshot offers different ones again. Halo shows a handful of relevant things rather than a complete inventory you have to read past.
It acts on what you already highlighted.
No copying into a box, no pasting back. The selected text is the input, and where the action produces text, that text replaces the selection in the original app.
There is no supported-apps list.
Mail, Slack, a browser, Notion, an IDE, a PDF, a form field. Halo reads the selection through macOS itself, so it does not need an integration with the app you happen to be in.
Actions that know your work.
Rewrite in your own voice, capture against the client the text mentions, ask what was decided about it before. The ring reaches your brain, which is what a generic text utility cannot do.
Anything you bank lands connected.
Capture from Halo and the result becomes a dot in your local brain, linked to the people and projects it mentions, alongside your notes, dictations and meetings.
Halo vs the right-click menu vs PopClip
You already have two ways to act on a selection, and one of them is free and installed, so here is the honest layout.
| Halo | Right-click menu | PopClip | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Where it appears | Ring at your cursor | List at your cursor | Bar above the selection |
| How it opens | ⌃⌥ hotkey | Right-click or Control-click | Automatically on selection |
| Options shown | Chosen for the selection and app | Fixed list, same every time | Your installed extensions |
| Setup required | None — the ring is populated for you | None | Install and manage extensions |
| Extension library | No third-party extensions | Services and Shortcuts you write | Large community library |
| Understands your own work | Yes — people, projects, past captures | No | No |
| Rewrites text in your voice | Yes, via your Voiceprint | No | Via a third-party extension |
| Price | Free tier, paid plans for more | Free, already installed | One-off paid app |
If what you want is a tidy launcher for a fixed set of operations — search this, open that, run a script — PopClip does it well, has a deeper extension library than Halo will, and appears without a keystroke. And the right-click menu is free, universal and already on your machine. Halo earns its place when the useful action depends on what the thing is and what you know about it, which a preconfigured list cannot work out for you.
What Halo can see
Only the selection, and only when you press the hotkey. Halo does not watch your screen or read what you have highlighted until you open the ring, and accessibility permission is what macOS requires for reading a selection and typing back into an app.
In Private mode, actions run on your Mac against a local model and nothing leaves the machine — the egress counter stays at zero. In Connected mode, only the text a specific action needs is sent to a hosted frontier model, and only for that action. Bring your own key and it goes from your Mac straight to your provider, never through our relay.
Nothing is retained by us, and nothing you select is used to train a model — not by us and not by the providers. Anything you choose to capture is written to a local index on your own disk.
Najczęstsze pytania
What is a radial menu, and why use one instead of a list?
A radial menu puts its options in a ring around the pointer, so every option is the same short distance away and each one has a direction rather than a position in a list. That makes it fast to learn by muscle memory — you flick towards an action instead of reading down to it — which is why rings suit a small set of frequent actions and lists suit long inventories.
Is Halo a PopClip alternative?
For AI-shaped actions on a selection, yes; for scripted utilities, not really. PopClip's strength is a large library of installable extensions that do specific, predictable things. Halo does not have an extension ecosystem — it populates itself based on what you selected and what Stilou knows about your work. Some people run both.
Which apps does Halo work in?
Any macOS app where you can select text or take a screenshot. Halo reads the selection through the system rather than through an integration, so Mail, Slack, browsers, editors, PDFs and form fields all work without anything being configured per app.
Can I change the hotkey?
Yes. ⌃⌥ is the default because it is reachable with one hand and rarely collides with app shortcuts, but you can set it to whatever your hands prefer.
Does Halo need accessibility permission, and what does that allow?
Yes, and it allows two things: reading the current selection and typing a result back into the app you are in. macOS asks for it explicitly on first use and you can revoke it at any time in System Settings, at which point Halo stops working rather than quietly doing something else.
Is my selected text sent anywhere?
In Private mode, no — actions run on your Mac and nothing leaves it. In Connected mode, the text an action needs is sent to a hosted model for that action only, nothing is retained, and nothing is used for training. Which mode you are in is shown in the interface.
Does it work without an internet connection?
Yes, in Private mode. Local actions such as capture and on-device rewrites keep working on a plane or with the network off. Actions that specifically call a hosted frontier model need a connection, and Halo tells you which those are.
What do I need to run it?
A Mac running a current version of macOS, and accessibility permission. On-device actions in Private mode run best on Apple silicon.