Lekhini

Lekhini — Sanskrit for “pen” (लेखनी) — is the first product from Open Source Bharat. It’s a transparent, always-on-top overlay that lets you draw, write, highlight and annotate anywhere on your screen, on top of any application. Built for teachers, presenters, traders and anyone who needs to mark up live content without switching apps.

The overlay is click-through by default, so the app underneath stays fully interactive until you toggle draw mode with a hotkey. It’s free, open source (MIT) and works across macOS, Windows and Linux. As of v1.1.0, Lekhini also ships with local-first AI — snip anything on screen and ask it to solve, explain or transcribe what’s there, running on-device by default.

✨ AI, local-first (new in 1.1.0)

Lekhini’s AI is entirely opt-in and private by default. With Local AI on, your snips and text never leave your machine — everything runs on-device via Ollama. Cloud providers are an optional fallback you wire up with your own API key. Nothing AI-related is enabled until you set it up in Settings → AI.

• Ask AI about a snip — drag a region, click Ask AI, and a chat panel solves what’s in the image (math, code, questions, errors) rather than just describing it. Follow-up questions keep the full conversation context until you start a new snip.
• Handwriting recognition — your drawn ink is transcribed to text on-device via a vision model.
• Autocorrect — typed text and recognized handwriting are cleaned up automatically, with per-kind toggles.
• Trader chart analysis — the Trader profile can hand your drawn levels to the AI for a written read of the chart.
• On-device learning — accepted corrections are remembered locally to personalize future suggestions; nothing leaves your machine.

Bring your own provider. Routing is local-first — if Local AI is on it’s used; otherwise your configured cloud provider is.

A full annotation toolkit

• Pencil & Pen as distinct tools — the pencil is graphite-textured with a uniform width; the pen is smooth ink with pressure-driven thinning. Picking a color while the pencil is active cleanly promotes you to the pen.
• Highlighter with a multiply blend, and a width-aware eraser.
• Shapes — horizontal/vertical lines, trendline (hold Shift to snap to common angles), Fibonacci retracement, rectangle, ellipse, arrow and text.
• Hand tool to select, move and edit strokes you’ve already drawn.
• Screen snip — capture a region with your annotations baked into the saved PNG.

Built for the way you work

• Profiles — General, Teacher (adds the highlighter) and Trader (trendline, Fibonacci, region selector) surface the right tools for the job.
• Multi-monitor — a transparent overlay per display, each with correct per-screen pixel ratios.
• Vertical or horizontal toolbar that adapts to its contents; your choice is remembered, along with per-tool thickness, color and theme.
• Tool-aware cursors, undo/redo (up to 100 steps), clear and screenshot — all from the toolbar or global hotkeys.

Fast and private

Lekhini renders strokes with perfect-freehand on a dual-canvas pipeline for sub-frame precision, and keeps everything local — there’s no telemetry and your screen content never leaves your machine. The AI is local-first too: with Local AI on, snips and text are processed on-device and never uploaded, and cloud providers are strictly opt-in. Screen Recording permission is used only when you save an annotated screenshot or snip a region.

Get started

Download the build for your operating system using the buttons above. On first launch, macOS asks for Screen Recording (for screenshot export) and Accessibility (so global hotkeys work while other apps are focused) — both are optional. Installed builds auto-update from GitHub Releases, so you stay on the latest version. Full setup steps and the complete hotkey list are in the documentation.