NotchPrompter

A teleprompter that lives in your Mac's notch. Your script floats above the menu bar, right under the camera, so you read and look into the lens at the same time.

Menu-bar app, no Dock icon, native SwiftUI + AppKit. Built for macOS 14 and later.

What it does

Prompter panel

• Borderless floating panel pinned over the menu bar / notch, above full-screen apps
• Left, center, right or free-dragged placement, on any connected display
• Adjustable width, height and top offset; fades at the top and bottom edges
• Mirror mode for teleprompter glass
• Drag the text to scrub, or turn on click-through so the panel ignores the mouse entirely

Hidden from recordings

• One toggle keeps the panel out of screen recordings and screen shares (NSWindow.sharingType = .none), so it is visible to you and invisible to your audience

Scrolling

• Steady auto-scroll at a speed you set, with countdown, loop and auto-start
• Progress bar along the bottom edge, per-frame smooth via CADisplayLink

Voice follow

• On-device speech recognition tracks where you are in the script and scrolls to match
• Survives pauses, ad-libs and skipped paragraphs: a fuzzy matcher scores the last few spoken words against every position within a look-ahead window
• Lines in brackets — [Pause], (beat) — render as dimmed stage directions and are skipped by the matcher
• Recognition sessions rotate automatically so the ~1 minute task limit never interrupts a take

Everything else

• Script editor with word count, read time, scroll time, plain-text and RTF import, export
• Font style (Default / Serif / Round / Mono / Dyslexic-friendly), size, line spacing, alignment
• Text, background and spoken-line colors; background opacity; corner radius
• Global shortcuts for play/pause, show/hide, restart, speed, nudge and voice — they work while you are recording in another app
• Launch at login

Build and run

xcodebuild -project NotchPrompter.xcodeproj -scheme NotchPrompter -configuration Debug build

Or open NotchPrompter.xcodeproj in Xcode and hit Run.

The app signs ad-hoc (CODE_SIGN_IDENTITY = "-") so it builds with no team configured. Set DEVELOPMENT_TEAM and switch CODE_SIGN_STYLE to Automatic before distributing.

Regenerate the app icon after editing Tools/make-icon.swift:

swift Tools/make-icon.swift

Permissions

Voice follow asks for Microphone and Speech Recognition the first time you enable it. Recognition stays on-device by default — no audio leaves the Mac. Everything else needs no permissions; the global shortcuts use Carbon hot keys, so there is no Accessibility prompt.

Default shortcuts

Action	Shortcut
Play / Pause	⌥⌘P
Show / Hide prompter	⌥⌘N
Back to start	⌥⌘R
Scroll faster / slower	⌥⌘↑ / ⌥⌘↓
Nudge down / up	⌥⌘→ / ⌥⌘←
Toggle voice follow	⌥⌘V

All rebindable in Settings › Shortcuts.

Layout

NotchPrompter/
  NotchPrompterApp.swift    menu bar extra, app delegate
  Models/                   settings store, script parsing
  Prompter/                 panel, scroll engine, display link, notch geometry
  Voice/                    speech recognition, fuzzy script matcher
  Shortcuts/                Carbon hot keys, key recorder
  UI/                       settings window and its panes
  Support/                  login item, color helpers
Tools/make-icon.swift       app icon generator

The Xcode target uses a synchronized folder group, so new files under NotchPrompter/ are picked up without editing the project file.