Troubleshooting
Common issues and how to fix them.
Capture not working
- Open System Settings > Privacy & Security
- Check that Tesseract is toggled on for both Screen Recording and Accessibility
- Restart Tesseract after granting permissions
If permissions were recently changed, macOS sometimes requires a full restart.
Menu bar icon not visible
- Check if Bartender, Ice, or a similar app is hiding menu bar items
- Verify Tesseract is actually running (check Activity Monitor)
MCP tools not showing up in Claude
- Make sure the path in your MCP config points to the correct binary:
/Applications/Tesseract.app/Contents/MacOS/tesseract-mcp - Restart Claude Code (or your MCP client) after adding the server
- Verify the binary exists:
ls -la /Applications/Tesseract.app/Contents/MacOS/tesseract-mcp
"Summarize day" returns an error
The summarize_day tool requires a configured LLM provider. Check your configuration:
- Claude API — Verify your API key is valid in
~/.config/tesseract/config.json - Ollama — Verify Ollama is running:
curl http://localhost:11434/api/tags - Apple Intelligence — Requires macOS 26.0+ (Tahoe)
High CPU usage
Normal CPU usage during capture is around 1%. If you see consistently high usage:
- Check Console.app for errors (filter by "Tesseract")
- Try pausing and resuming capture
- If the issue persists, quit and relaunch Tesseract
Auto-update not working
- Check that "Automatically check for updates" is enabled in Settings
- Try manually checking: menu bar > Check for Updates...
- Tesseract checks for updates once every 24 hours