Obsidian Finally Lets You Copy Web Pages Directly Into Notes
Obsidian has long been one of the best Evernote alternatives . It’s a powerful app, works great as a journaling app , and offers a lot of great plugins . The only downside has always been the lack of a web clipper. Until now.
This week, Obsidian finally announced the release of a new web clipper available for almost every web browser – “Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Brave, Arc, Orion and many more,” according to the developer. With it, you can cut out any article you come across on the Internet; the extension grabs only the relevant text and stores it in your Obsidian storage.
By default, the plugin includes a lot of relevant information at the top of the document, in the Properties section, including the source, author, and publication date. You can customize this or remove it completely in the extension settings. You can also create multiple templates containing different information if you wish.
One feature I particularly like is the highlighter. This will turn the entire Internet into your personal notebook: highlight text on any page of any website, and it will remain highlighted the next time you visit with the extension running. You can also cut only the highlights in Obsidian instead of cutting the entire article.
This is an ideal use case when you find a paragraph that you know you’ll want to quote later. Instead of grabbing a paragraph and then separately grabbing the URL and author name, you can do it all at once in just a couple of clicks. The plugin also works well on mobile devices (I tested the Safari version), meaning you can snip snippets while reading on the couch and then reference them in your work when you return to your desk later.
It’s a really well thought out tool and it’s free and even open source. If you’re an Obsidian user, there’s no good reason not to give it a try. And if you’ve been holding back on switching to Obsidian due to the lack of a web clipper, you now have no such excuse.