~5MB
App size
Veil is a native Swift macOS menu-bar AI client that vanishes from every screen recorder on your machine — Zoom, Meet, Teams, OBS, QuickTime. Not a hack. One AppKit flag, applied at the compositor level. ~5 MB. Zero telemetry. Open source.
NSWindow.SharingType, not the inferred enum.
NSWindow.sharingType = .none tells macOS to remove the window from the display server's capture pipeline at the compositor level — before any app can observe a single frame.
The window renders on your monitor normally. It simply does not exist to CGWindowListCreateImage, SCStreamConfiguration, or any screen-capture API.
Confirmed against the major meeting clients, OBS, QuickTime, and the system ⌘ + Shift + 5 picker. Same flag, same outcome — documented public API, not a kernel hack.
Lives only as ⬡ in the menu bar. No Mission Control entry, no Alt-Tab presence, no notification badges. The app is there for you, and only you.
| Trait | ⬡ VEIL | Tauri-based | Electron A | Electron B | Closed-source SaaS |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tech stack | Native Swift | Tauri / WebView | Electron | Electron | Electron |
| App size | ~5 MB | ~10 MB | ~150 MB | ~200 MB | ~300 MB |
| macOS-native build | ✓ Purpose-built | Cross-platform | Cross-platform | Cross-platform | Cross-platform |
| Local LLMs (Ollama) | ✓ First-class | ~ Partial | ✓ | ✗ | Cloud only |
| Price | Free, forever | Free | Free tier | Free | $20–$149 / mo |
| Telemetry | Zero | Unknown | Limited | Unknown | Breached, 2025 |
| On-device voice | ✓ whisper.cpp | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | ~ Cloud |
| Open source | MIT | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
Hidden from every screen-capture tool on macOS — meeting clients, OBS, QuickTime, screenshot picker. The recorder draws empty pixels.
No Electron, no Chromium, no WebView. ~5 MB binary, sub-100 ms cold start, zero memory bloat. The way Mac apps are supposed to feel.
Ollama, OpenAI, Claude, OpenRouter, NVIDIA NIM, LM Studio, llama.cpp, Azure — and any OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Bring your own model.
whisper.cpp transcribes locally on your Mac. Speak, paste, dictate. Audio never leaves the machine — the server only sees the text you sent.
Capture any region, attach to a message, get an answer. The model sees the pixels. Whoever is recording you sees a frozen frame from a second ago.
No analytics. No crash reports. No accounts. Network traffic goes to one place: the AI backend you configured. Inspect it on the wire.
Veil-v1.0.1.dmg from the Releases page.Free. Native. Open source. The AI client that's there for you, and only you.