04 The Highlighter
Web Clipper: The Highlighter
Highlight web pages in your browser the way you would mark up a book — then clip only what you marked.
Highlighting
You can highlight:
- Text — a selection.
- Individual elements — a paragraph, a code block, an image.
- Entire pages.
Toggle highlighter mode with its keyboard shortcut, or start from the right-click menu.
Undo and redo work while you highlight.
Highlights persist
Highlights survive reloads and repeat visits. Come back to the page next week and your marks are still there.
They are stored locally in your browser, not in MDflow. Which means: they do not sync between machines, and clearing your browser data removes them. Export them if they matter — see below.
When highlights appear
Two modes:
- Always show saved highlights on page load — your marks are simply there whenever you return.
- Only while highlighter mode is active — the page reads normally, and your marks appear when you ask.
Getting highlights into a clip
Three options control how highlights are saved:
| Option | Result |
|---|---|
| Keep them inline | The full page content, with your highlights marked within it |
| Replace the page content with them | Only the highlighted passages — everything else discarded |
| Save without highlights | The page as normal, marks ignored |
The middle option is the interesting one. It turns a 4,000-word article into the six passages you actually wanted, in your workspace, in markdown.
Managing highlights
A dedicated view lists everything you have highlighted, with:
- Search.
- Sorting by name or date.
Deleting
Delete highlights:
- for a page,
- for a whole domain,
- or all at once.
Exporting
Export highlights to a file.
Do this periodically if you highlight seriously. Highlights live in browser storage — they are not in your MDflow workspace unless you clipped them into a document, and they do not follow you to another machine. The export is your backup — see 09 Settings, History and Language.
The reading workflow
The highlighter is at its best combined with clipping (see 03 Ways to Clip):
- Read the page normally.
- Highlight the passages that matter.
- Clip with replace the page content with them.
- Add a note explaining why you saved it.
The result is a short document of exactly the parts you cared about — far more useful than an archived copy of a page you will never re-read in full, and far better material for an AI agent than 4,000 words of which six sentences mattered.