Hello everyone,
with the help of Claude Code, I made a simple add on to have the same Lookup experience on Anki as you have on iOS and other apps on the Mac.
Keyboard shortcut: L
The add-on enables the use of Apple’s Look Up when you select text on a card. Anki on the Mac only offers Copy.
macOS only.
What it does
- Select a word, right-click, choose Look Up “…” in Dictionary: the macOS Look Up panel opens over the word, as in Safari, with the dictionaries enabled in the Dictionary app.
- Works in the reviewer, previewer, card layout screen and editor.
- Review shortcut: select a word and press L. (⌃⌘D can’t be used: macOS keeps it and never passes it to Anki.)
- Right-click menus on cards and in the editor are shown as native macOS menus, with the same items. Can be turned off.
- Menu item and messages in English, Italian or Japanese, following Anki’s language.
Limitations
- While a native menu is open, Anki’s timers pause until it closes.
- Tested only with Anki 25.09.4 on macOS 27, Apple Silicon. Let me know if it works on your machine.
Privacy
The selected text goes only to macOS Look Up or the Dictionary app. It calls Apple’s AppKit through Python’s ctypes, with no extra libraries.
I should have searched it before starting but it came to me only afterwards…
Two other users came up with the same idea. numbers: 1439965117 and 2059332871 as I cannot insert more than two links…
Mine gives the native Mac window appearance.
Download and source on GitHub: GitHub - Amost-/anki-macos-look-up: Anki add-on for macOS: look up selected text with the native macOS Look Up panel, from a native right-click menu. · GitHub – install the .ankiaddon from Releases (double-click, restart Anki). Guides in English, Italian and Japanese. License: AGPL-3.0-or-later.
Thank you for your time.