The Caps Lock key has never done anything useful. Until now.
I have pressed Caps Lock accidentally approximately ten thousand times in my life. It has never once been intentional. So when I saw that LacPointer remaps it to something called Wand, my reaction was basically "sure, at least it won't ruin my passwords anymore."
Turns out Wand is one of those features you start using constantly and then feel a little lost without.
What Wand actually does
The idea is simple: hover your cursor over anything on screen, press Caps Lock, and LacPointer explains it. That's it. It reads whatever is under your cursor — a chunk of code, a cryptic error message, a legal clause in a terms of service doc, a dashboard metric you've never understood — and gives you a plain English breakdown right there on your desktop.
No selecting text. No right-clicking. No opening a new tab, pasting into ChatGPT, waiting for the page to load, reading the response, then trying to remember what you were doing. You just hover and press a key.
I use it most on error messages. When a stack trace shows up in my terminal or browser console, my old workflow was: read it, squint, copy the relevant line, switch tabs, paste, ask. That's four or five context switches for something that should take five seconds. With Wand it's one keypress and I'm reading the explanation before I've even moved my hand.
Copy Mode: the passive version
Wand has a second mode that I actually find even more useful day to day: Copy Mode.
When Copy Mode is on, LacPointer watches your clipboard. Every time you copy something — Cmd+C or Ctrl+C, doesn't matter — it automatically runs that text through the AI and shows you an explanation. You don't have to press anything extra. Copy the thing, see the explanation.
This sounds like it might get annoying fast, but in practice it's surprisingly well-behaved. If you copy a URL or a file path or a single word it mostly stays quiet. Where it actually fires is when you copy a block of code, a paragraph of dense documentation, or a configuration snippet you're about to paste somewhere you don't fully understand. Those are exactly the moments you want context.
I had it on all last week while reading through an unfamiliar codebase. Every time I copied a function to reference somewhere else, I got a quiet little sidebar explaining what it does. Saved me from grepping through files I didn't need to open.
Sharing and pushing to Notion
Once Wand gives you an explanation, you've got two options beyond just reading it.
First, you can share it directly with a teammate. LacPointer generates a shareable snippet you can drop into Slack or a chat. Useful when someone asks you to explain a piece of code you're both looking at — just Wand it and share the result instead of typing out an explanation yourself.
Second, you can push straight to Notion. If you're building documentation, writing up a bug report, or keeping engineering notes in Notion, you can send a Wand explanation there with one click. No copy-pasting the AI's output, no switching to Notion, no finding the right page. It just lands there.
The Notion integration works through LacPointer's natural language layer — the same one you use when you type things like "add a task to my Notion inbox." So if you've already connected Notion via Option+Space, the push button in Wand just works.
Where it's genuinely most useful
A few places where I reach for Wand almost every day:
- Reading docs: API reference pages are dense. Wand a function signature or a config table and get the short version.
- Unfamiliar codebases: hover over a regex, a decorator, or a cryptic one-liner and understand it before you decide whether to touch it.
- Error messages: stack traces, compiler errors, linter output — Wand reads the whole visible block, not just one line.
- Legal or contract text: I've actually used this for privacy policies and license files. Not glamorous but very practical.
- Dashboard metrics: if you're in a tool with a metric you've never understood, Wand can usually explain it from context.
A note on how it reads the screen
Wand uses accessibility APIs to pull text from whatever is under the cursor. It doesn't take a screenshot and OCR it — it reads the actual text content of the UI element. This means it's fast, it works on any app that uses standard accessibility APIs (which is most of them), and it doesn't fail on small fonts or dark backgrounds the way an OCR approach would.
On macOS you may see an accessibility permissions prompt the first time. Just grant it and you're done.
One thing worth knowing
Wand's explanations go through your configured AI provider, the same one LacPointer uses for everything else. So if you're on the Free plan, Wand responses count against your token budget. If you're running heavy Copy Mode sessions — copying a lot of large code blocks — it'll add up. For heavy use, the Pro plan removes token limits and makes Wand genuinely worry-free.
That said, on Free you still get 4,000 tokens every 15 hours, which covers a reasonable amount of explaining before you hit the ceiling.
Try it right now
If you have LacPointer installed, you already have Wand — no setup required. Just hover over something confusing on your screen and press Caps Lock. If you want to turn on Copy Mode, open LacPointer with Option+Space, go to settings, and flip the Copy Mode toggle.
The Caps Lock key has finally earned its spot on the keyboard.