Highlight what's notable, eliminate what's not.
Treat any website like your personal canvas. Erase what you don't need. Annotate what matters. Highlight, redact, and draw — all persistent across sessions, all stored privately on your machine.
Adnota is a Manifest V3 Chrome Extension built around a single core idea: your annotations live with the page, not in a silo. Every change you make to a website persists automatically, restores on the next visit, and is instantly accessible from a dedicated history view. No accounts, no cloud, no data leaving the browser.
Mark it up. Block it out. Make it yours.
Brand color purple: #7c3aed
The product North Star: Adnota today is "make any webpage yours" (destructive + additive edits on any specific page)
Chrome Web Store — coming soon.
Load unpacked (current path):
- Clone or download this repo
- Open
chrome://extensionsin Chrome - Enable Developer mode (top-right toggle)
- Click Load unpacked and select the repo's root directory
- Pin the Adnota icon in the toolbar for easy access
The repo root loads directly — no build step needed to try it. To run the minified bundle that ships to the Web Store, see Build and load dist/ instead.
Two layers: global (work anywhere, always) and bare-key (work only when the dock is visible AND no input/textarea/contenteditable is focused AND no modifier is held). The dock-visible gate makes the dock itself the "annotation mode armed" indicator — if you can see it, the bare keys are live.
Global
| Shortcut | Action |
|---|---|
Alt+A |
Turn Adnota on for the current domain (or off if it's already on, per-domain persisted). Pressing on an inactive domain activates the dock; pressing on an active domain deactivates it. While a tool is active, exits the tool and deactivates in one keystroke. Symmetric counterpart to clicking the dock's X |
Alt+S |
Show / Hide all annotations |
Ctrl+Z / Cmd+Z |
Undo last action (any tool) |
Escape |
Deactivate active tool (universal — works from any tool, any state) / cancel text input |
Bare-key (when dock is visible)
| Shortcut | Action |
|---|---|
e |
Toggle Eraser |
r |
Toggle Resizer |
s |
Toggle Sticky Notes |
d |
Toggle Draw HUD (enters pen by default) |
f |
Toggle the page snippets scratch pad (no-op when the page has no highlights or notes) |
Tool-specific
| Shortcut | Action |
|---|---|
Shift (hold) |
Paint annotations become first-class objects — click to select, drag to move, Delete to remove. Drawing tools (pen/arrow/rect/ellipse/text) are suspended while Shift is held, so there's no overlap between drawing and selecting. Links/buttons under empty canvas still behave normally — only paint items are hijacked |
Shift+Click |
(Eraser only) Site-wide deletion |
Enter |
(Text tool) Commit text |
Shift+Enter |
(Text tool) Insert newline |
Delete / Backspace |
(Select tool) Delete selected annotation |
Double-click |
(Select/Text tool) Re-edit existing text annotation |
Shift+Scroll Wheel |
(Eraser & Resizer) Walk up/down DOM tree to target parent or child elements. Plain scroll (no Shift) is left alone so the user can scroll the page while a tool is active |
The repo root is loadable as unpacked for day-to-day development with no build step. npm run build is only needed to produce or test the minified bundle that ships to the Chrome Web Store.
npm install # one-time
npm run build # writes a minified copy under dist/
npm run build:watch # rebuilds on file change
npm run lint # eslintdist/ mirrors the source tree (per-file minification, not bundling — manifest load order matters; see tools/build.sh for the rationale). Load dist/ as unpacked the same way as the source root to test the shipped bundle.
Versioning is driven by npm version. A version lifecycle script syncs manifest.json to match package.json and stages it, so one command bumps both files, commits, and tags.
npm version patch # 0.9.0 → 0.9.1 (or minor / major)
npm run build # produce dist/
(cd dist && zip -r ../adnota.zip .)
# Upload adnota.zip to the Chrome Web Store dashboard
git push --follow-tags # push the commit + version tagnpm version refuses to run on a dirty working tree by default — commit unrelated changes first.
For an implementation-level walkthrough of every script, library, and design decision, see CODE.md.