Obsidian has long been one of the best alternatives to Evernote. It’s powerful, works great as a journaling app, and offers lots of great plugins. The one shortcoming has always been the lack of a web clipper. Until now.
This week Obsidian finally announced the launch of a new web clipper, available for just about every web browser—”Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Brave, Arc, Orion, and many more” according to the developer. With it you can clip any article you run across on the web; the extension grabs only the relevant text and saves it into your Obsidian vault.
Credit: Justin Pot
By default, the plugin includes a lot of relevant information at the top of the document, in the “Properties” section, including the source, the author, and publication date. You can customize this, or remove it entirely, in the extension’s settings. You can also create multiple templates that included different information if you like.
One feature I particularly love is the highlighter. This turns the entire internet into your own personal notebook—highlight text on any page on any website and it will remain highlighted the next time you visit it with the extension running. You can also clip just the highlights to Obsidian, instead of clipping the entire article.
Credit: Justin Pot
This is a perfect use case for when you find a paragraph that you know you’re going to want to quote later. Instead of grabbing the paragraph, then making sure you separately grab the URL and the author’s name, you can do everything at once in just a couple of clicks. The plugin works well on mobile too (I tested the Safari version), meaning you can clip things while reading on the couch, then reference them in your work when you get to your desk later.
It’s a really well thought-out tool, it’s free, and it’s even open source. If you’re an Obsidian user, there is no good reason not to try it out. And if you’ve been holding back on switching to Obsidian because of the lack of a web clipper, well, now you don’t have that excuse.
