// the find
f/textream
Textream is a free macOS teleprompter app for streamers, interviewers, and presenters. It highlights your script in real-time as you speak, displayed in a beautiful Dynamic Island overlay. With extensible features.
Textream is a free, open-source teleprompter for macOS (plus an iOS/iPadOS companion) that highlights your script as you speak and displays it in a Dynamic Island-style overlay, floating window, or fullscreen/Sidecar. It's aimed at streamers, podcasters, presenters, and interviewers who want a decent teleprompter without paying for one or buying a hardware rig.
Three distinct guidance modes (word-tracking via speech recognition, constant-speed auto-scroll, voice-activated) cover different workflows without forcing mic use if you don't want it. Director Mode is a real, documented WebSocket/HTTP protocol with auth, 10Hz state broadcasts, and a worked Python client example — unusually thorough for a niche utility app, and it actually supports building custom remote-control clients. External display/Sidecar support with proper mirror-axis options shows the author built for actual teleprompter glass rigs, not just a screen overlay demo. No accounts, telemetry, or vendor cloud dependency, and it's MIT licensed so the whole thing is auditable.
Both the Remote Connection and Director Mode servers are plaintext HTTP/WebSocket with no TLS, and the Director auth token is scraped out of the HTML via regex rather than issued through any real handshake — workable on a trusted LAN but a fragile, roll-your-own auth design the README itself warns not to expose publicly. Word Tracking mode leans on Apple's speech recognition, which may send mic audio off-device depending on language/availability, and there's no setting to force on-device-only recognition. The requirements are aggressive and locked to Apple's latest (macOS 15+, Xcode 16+/26+ for iOS, Swift 6 on the iOS target) with no path to Windows/Linux given how much of the Mac app is built around NotchOverlayController and Sidecar-specific APIs. Test coverage is lopsided — TextreamiOSTests exists but there's no visible test target for the macOS app, which is the primary product and carries the more complex logic (overlay controllers, two custom servers, speech alignment).