NoteLace

Browser extension

Capture the page, in plain Markdown, on your machine.

The NoteLace web clipper is a small browser extension that turns the page you’re reading into a Markdown note in your NoteLace vault. One click, no server in the loop, your vault stays where it lives.

How it works

  1. Click the NoteLace icon in your browser’s toolbar.
  2. The extension reads the page’s content with Mozilla’s Readability + Turndown, both running in your browser tab.
  3. You see a Markdown preview. Edit the title or trim the body if you want.
  4. Click Save to NoteLace. The extension opens a notelace:// URL; your OS routes it to the desktop app, which drops the new note in a notebook called Inbox.

Privacy posture

The extension manifest declares two permissions: activeTab (granted only on click, on the tab you actually clipped) and scripting (needed to inject the reader script). No host_permissions. No background data collection. No third-party analytics. No NoteLace server in the loop.

Local HTML → local Readability + Turndown → local URL handoff to the local app. Even with sync turned on, the page content reaches NoteLace via your own machine first — the server only sees it through normal CouchDB replication.

Getting it

The extension is in Chrome Web Store review. When it’s live we’ll add the install button here and announce it in the changelog. In the meantime, you can build + load it unpacked from the open-source repo (this page documents the install steps below).

Developer install (until the store listing lands)

  1. Clone the NoteLace repo, then cd web/apps/clipper && npm install && npm run build.
  2. Open chrome://extensions, enable Developer mode, click Load unpacked, and pick the dist/ directory.
  3. Install NoteLace v0.1.18 or later from /download — earlier versions don’t claim the notelace:// protocol.
  4. Visit any article, click the toolbar icon, hit Save.

What it can’t do (yet)

  • Clip a selection rather than the whole article — on the roadmap.
  • Save into a specific notebook — everything currently lands in Inbox. You can move notes from there in NoteLace.
  • Run on Firefox — it’s a Chromium MV3 extension today (works on Chrome, Edge, Brave, Arc, Vivaldi). Firefox support is a half-day port.

Questions? [email protected].

Web clipper — NoteLace