ScrollTag: Private Web Highlighter and Notes

Highlight text on any web page, add notes and group passages by project. Every highlight is stored locally.

ScrollTag highlights text on any web page and stores every highlight locally. When a reader selects text, ScrollTag offers four colors, and a click on one saves the passage along with the page it came from. A panel at the side of the page lists every highlight in page order, and a single button copies the whole set as clean text, ready to paste into a document, a note or a draft. Every saved highlight includes its own words plus a short stretch of the text around them, which lets ScrollTag locate the passage again after a reload, after the window changes size, or on a page that rewrites its own content while it is open. When the wording has changed since the passage was highlighted, ScrollTag uses the closest match instead. It draws highlights with the CSS Custom Highlight API built into the browser, which colors the text in place and leaves the page's own code as it was, so the page keeps working as its authors built it. Someone researching one topic across many sites can create a section for it once, from Collect into at the top of the panel, and ScrollTag files every highlight made after that into the section, whatever site it comes from. Highlights made outside a section are kept as well, listed under the site they came from. In the panel, This page shows the highlights on the open page, Sections lists every section with the pages filed into it, and All sites covers every highlight ever made, grouped by website. A reader can add a note to any highlight to record why it was kept. A single action then copies one highlight, a page, a section or the whole collection, with each note printed underneath its passage as a quoted line, and Download saves the same text as a Markdown or plain-text file. Back up everything writes all highlights, notes and sections to a JSON file, which Restore from a backup reads into ScrollTag again, on the same computer or on another one. Keyboard shortcuts (Alt is Option on a Mac): Alt+M: highlight the selected text Alt+1 to Alt+4: highlight in neutral, yellow, blue or pink Alt+C: copy the highlights showing in the panel Alt+K: open or close the panel Alt+. and Alt+,: go to the next or previous highlight on the page ScrollTag stores highlights, notes and sections locally, in the browser's own extension storage, and it sends nothing over the network. The developer receives no copy of anyone's highlights, and ScrollTag has no account, analytics or advertising. Uninstalling ScrollTag deletes everything it stored.