Gathering feedback on the Trilium Web clipper

[eliandoran]

Hi,

How often do you use the Trilium web clipper, and how useful is it to you? I'm considering spending some time modernizing it, and I'd like to understand how it's actually used and what it's missing.

A few things I'm curious about:

• What do you clip most? Whole pages, selections, screenshots, just links/bookmarks?
• If you don't use it (or stopped), what's the blocker? Setup, reliability, missing feature, or you just save things another way?
• Where do clips end up for you? Do you keep everything in the inbox / daily note, or do you constantly move clips somewhere else afterwards?
• What's the one missing feature that would change how you use it?

Some ideas on my radar, in no particular order, feel free to +1 or push back:

• Choosing the destination note and adding labels at clip time
• A highlighter: highlight text on a page and have highlights collect into one note per page
• Preview/edit the clip before saving
• Clips queue up offline when Trilium isn't running and sync later
• Per-site templates that auto-extract metadata (author, date, etc.) into labels

Not promising all of this, just trying to figure out what's worth building first.

[hulmgulm]

I use the WebClipper maybe once a week. I only save whole pages, but saving the selection would be nice to have.
The pages mostly get sorted away into other notes of the same context.

[BeatLink]

I actually use another extension i vibe coded in lieu of the webclipper. Maybe you could integrate its functionality.

https://github.com/BeatLink/Web2Trilium

Some key differences with the existing version is that it clips to a web render note with the URL set to the link so that if you go to trilium and click on the link you can see right away what the webpage was and even navigate it. There's also a sidebar and dedicated page that shows opened tabs and bookmarks and lets you either save a page to trillium, close/delete it or move and reorganize it.

My main problem with webclipper was the the lack of the render view with only the screenshot or the text link available, and the lack of an organize page: you have to go page by page.

[eliandoran]

Interesting use case. So basically it's more like bookmarks for you.
The only downside I see here is that if you are using web views, that means that the content of the page can be lost if the web site goes down. 🤔

[ricolandia]

@BeatLink Nice one! I'll be sure to test that out. Having bookmarks right inside Trilium is a concept I really like.

[BeatLink]

Interesting use case. So basically it's more like bookmarks for you. The only downside I see here is that if you are using web views, that means that the content of the page can be lost if the web site goes down. 🤔

You're right but the render view has the best of both worlds. Lightweight storage of a link and quick visibility of a screenshot

[ricolandia]

Hi @eliandoran

I think it would be great to modernize the web clipper. Here are my answers to your questions:

• What I clip: I usually save tutorials and software news. Sometimes I capture entire pages, and other times I just take cropped screenshots.
• How often I use it: Not very frequently, and the main reason is AI search. These days, my workflow has changed: I search for something, ask for a summary, and then copy (or drag) the resulting Markdown file straight into Trilium. I actually put together a Python script for that (with some help from DeepSeek and opencode). It's interesting how fast our habits are evolving. I don't know if it's just me, but I actively avoid sites cluttered with ads and pop-ups. Using a local AI combined with this Python tool has been a huge help. It makes me wonder what things will look like in a few years... but, back to the topic at hand.

My clips currently go to a sub‑note inside my daily journal. I either move them to a permanent location if they're worth keeping, or simply delete them.

• On practicality: I do find it handy when I'm browsing a website. I think users should be able to choose the destination folder at the moment of saving, or alternatively, set that preference during the first launch.

Regarding your ideas:

• Choosing the destination note and adding labels at clip time → Yes, absolutely.
• A highlighter feature → Great!
• Preview and edit → Excellent!
• Offline clip queue → I'm not so sure about this one. I think it should just save on the spot.
• Per‑site templates → That would be really nice.

My two cents (additional suggestions):

• An auto‑summarize option (maybe leveraging the AI already integrated into TriliumNext?).
• A save‑with‑comment feature (perhaps as a sub‑note).
• A "clean version" that strips out all images and keeps only plain Markdown.

That's all from me. Hope this helps!

[ricolandia]

Just adding one more idea to the mix:

· The "web view" note type could work as a separate shortcut for this, because a lot of the time I'm browsing right inside Trilium and I end up searching specifically for that kind of note. It could be another entry point for saving content, on top of the traditional clipper.

Also, the AI Model widget could take on this search-and-save role too.

[march-7th-mini]

“Save whole page” is by far the clipper feature I use the most.

My typical scenario: whenever I come across a technical document worth keeping, archiving the full page as a note makes it far easier to search and reference later than a bare title or bookmark ever could. The clipper also does a great job stripping out ads and other distractions, and it can sometimes get around copy restrictions or forced login redirects.

So far the clipper handles blog posts and web-based AI chat sessions quite well — it mostly preserves the full layout and formatting of the article or conversation. That said, I’ve run into two rough edges:

• Occasionally, the same article gets saved as multiple duplicated notes.

• For a multi-turn AI chat on the web, sometimes only the most recent turn ends up in the note, with the earlier conversation lost.

One more wish: for complex pages, it would be great if the clipper could behave the SingleFile extension — preserving the complete page styling and saving a standalone HTML copy into the note.

Thanks for all the on this

[diyoyo]

@eliandoran ,
I use it quite often to save whole pages of articles (most frequent use case) and also to save links, when it comes to browsing nearby events for the weekend. Just like a tab saver, let's say.

Here are a few improvement directions:

• Pages are concatenated into the same note when the url doesn't change (even though the website has loaded new dynamic content)
• or even sometime, nothing happens because Trilium thinks the page is already saved (I suspect for the same reason as above)
• sometimes, page parsing is really bad, and all images are missing.

Also, something that probably cannot be solved is the single port config. I have a bat file that downloads nightlies and automatically assigns a new port. So if I'm testing a different nightly, or a release, of the same instance (same db content), I have to reconfigure the clipper with the newly assigned port. But that's just a bad architecture from my side 😵‍💫

But most importantly, I feel like it drains a lot of memory or power or whatever. I had it on multiple Brave profiles and now I only keep it active in one or two.

[Staenly]

I actively use the Web Clipper to save individual words and sentences from various sites, so I really feel the need for a "save selection to the end of an existing note" feature. Currently, whenever I save selected text from a new URL, it creates a brand new sub-note. Because of this, I end up with dozens of small, scattered notes throughout the day that I have to merge at the end of the day.

I would also really love the ability to save not the whole page and not just plain text, but a specific block of a site (for example, a quote, a table, a product card) in its exact visual appearance as displayed on the page (with styles, fonts, and layout). I remember NimbusNote used to have a great clipper that allowed you to do this:

1. The user activates the "Select Element" mode (similar to the element picker in uBlock Origin when you want to block specific elements).
2. As you hover the mouse over the page, DOM elements are interactively highlighted. Clicking on the desired element captures precisely that block and saves it to the note, preserving the original visual styling (along with the attached CSS styles or HTML)

[contributor]

@eliandoran

How often do you use the Trilium web clipper?

Multiple times a day. I would not use Trilium without the web clipper.

What do you clip most? Whole pages, selections, screenshots, or just links/bookmarks?

Selections. Never whole pages—even when I save a full article, I still select it in the browser before clipping it (to make sure there are no extra elements that are present on every site). Screenshots are rare.

Where do clips end up for you? Do you keep everything in the inbox / daily note, or do you constantly move clips somewhere else afterwards?

Inbox, then move them. Depending on the domain, clippings arrive in a dedicated "subject inbox" via custom web-clipper handlers build).

What's the one missing feature that would change how you use it?

To support my workflows, I add missing features myself. For me, the clipper extension eventually turned an interface/API for feeding HTML and URL data from the browser into Trilium, and report result back to browser.

I do miss some protocol features, if that counts.

Top quick fixes would be:

• Successful clipping should return more information in the toast notification (which note the clipping arrived in, whether a new note was created, or whether it was appended to an existing one).
• An unsuccessful clipping (when Trilium is not running) should display a big, red, loud toast notification. The current toast looks very similar to the success notification, so you may think the clipping succeeded when it actually didn't.

Choosing the destination note and adding labels at clip time

This would be useful. Clipping sessions often belong to the same subject, so preserving the last-used destination would save time organizing future clips. However, this could also lead to the opposite problem—you accidentally save to the wrong destination and can't find the clipping later. One solution could be a "virtual clipper inbox": a read-only log of all clipped notes.

Another feature would be an option to append to specific note (the note would not have its #pageUrl, each append/clipping would create a paragraph url+selection)

A highlighter: highlight text on a page and have highlights collect into one note per page

If this means that when you revisit a web page it highlights the text you previously saved in Trilium, that would be a very cool feature. Raindrop.io has this, but the data isn't yours or stored locally.

Preview/edit the clip before saving

Editing sounds useful, especially if it's paired with an auto-preview domain list. If you always save from certain domains, you wouldn't need to manually enable or disable preview every time.

Clips queue up offline when Trilium isn't running and sync later

This is a great idea. If the user doesn't realize Trilium isn't running, they wouldn't need to reselect and reclip the content (and some sites do their best to make selecting large chunks of text difficult).

Per-site templates that auto-extract metadata (author, date, etc.) into labels

I am solving this problem with Tampermonkey scripts and Trilium custom handler notes. Native support would still be welcome. Though it looks like a quite a challenge to make general solution suitable for non-tech users.

[stephenrjr]

@eliandoran So happy you asked for feedback ... I was just thinking today "Web Clipper needs some love!"

Before I started using Trilium, I was a heavy user of MS OneNote (thanks again for working with me to improve the import features). My main computer is Mac Mini, but I do work from a variety of devices (Windows laptop, iPad Pro, iPhone) and therefore host a server instance of Trilium to keep my knowledge base / notes centralized and backed-up. Connectivity across all of these clients is handled using Tailscale.

My old workflow for capturing screen content relied heavily on the built-in macOS features accessed using keyboard shortcuts. Mainly, CMD+shift+4 to crop a portion of the screen, and sometimes CMD+shift+5 to grab and entire screen. Using this mechanism meant having to define a landing directory on my filesystem, then opening Finder to that location, and then Copy-Paste the .PNG into OneNote.

Now with Trilium, I'm forcing myself to use Web Clipper (but only from Firefox, since Safari isn't currently supported -- this would be a welcome feature expansion!). I love the ability to capture an entire web page regardless of screen visibility. What I'm missing are sensible shortcut keys mapped to each of the capture options. Also, I've adopted the #newNotesOnTop feature to place newly created notes near my "root" note. Perhaps being able to tag a note as the Clipper Home would provide a default landing location, and as you mentioned, there could be an option to supply a different landing note at time of clipping.

When using the "Save link with a note" option, the resulting note and UX was confusing at first. And even after noticing that a marker appears at the top of the not (says Web Clip, I believe), it was a bit hidden to me. The fact that a link was captured seems too hidden.

Now on to your specific ideas:

• Choosing the destination note and adding labels at clip time -- +1 (however, a majority of the time, I might not know exactly where I'm going to stash the note...or simply keep it around temporarily in my holding area, so for me, this might actually be lightly used.)

• A highlighter: highlight text on a page and have highlights collect into one note per page -- Not sure I would highlight, but I can use a feature that allows several clips to arrive at the "add to last note" or "default location".

• Preview/edit the clip before saving -- If reviewing clippings and choosing to keep/delete is quick (fewest keystrokes + shortcut keys), I would probably just re-do a clip where I may have missed the crop, or accidentally cropped when I wanted full page or just screen. However, if during the preview, I can annotate/draw/highlight or decide to discard ... similar to macOS screen clipping ... this is very handy and saves time.

• Clips queue up offline when Trilium isn't running and sync later -- ++1 honestly, I through this is how the clients where already handling new notes and clippings. If clips aren't queued today, this is a valuable feature, especially when mobile and not able to sync with the server due to connectivity issues.

• Per-site templates that auto-extract metadata (author, date, etc.) into labels -- Very interesting. Currently, I rely of the full timestamp to know when I captured the clip. But if taking a clip from a website, and there is metadata about that page, like "Last Modified", URL, etc. Those might be helpful. What would be interesting would be Content Watchers ... that can change the look of a Clip border, or change a clipped hyperlink to indicate that the original source page/content has changed since the clip was made. But being interesting and useful don't always align.

[stephenrjr]

Took a minute to dig into the help docs ... and found keyboard shortcuts:

Save selected text: Ctrl+Shift+S (Mac: ⌘+⇧+S)
Save whole page: Alt+Shift+S (Mac: ⌥+⇧+S)
Save screenshot: Ctrl+Shift+E (Mac: ⌘+⇧+E)

These spawned another thought ... allow User configuration of keyboard shortcuts AND a dynamic cheat sheet showing the current settings. I found the "Show cheat sheet" under the Trilium logo ... perhaps this page is already dynamically generated?

[stephenrjr]

Here's an idea ... add a DOM-aware object clip option to grab various in-page assets cleanly ... like images and tables and maybe other objects.

In this example, if I could simply "Clip image" or enter a selection mode where my mouse hover highlights items that are clip-able, that would save time and produce cleaner clipped assets.

Likewise, sometimes a Whole Page I'd like to clip has objects on page I don't care for ... allow me to De-select or remove unwanted objects before capturing the clip.

[stephenrjr]

Object clipping would be similar to web browser tools:

[eliandoran]

Hi,

Thanks for your feedback I will take note of them when I'll take some time to work on the clipper.

Perhaps being able to tag a note as the Clipper Home

Note that this is already possible via a clipperInbox label (see https://docs.triliumnotes.org/user-guide/setup/web-clipper#location-of-clippings)

[stephenrjr]

Yes, sorry for the repeat -- I read about that label this morning.

[nosbig]

I use the Web Clipper sporadically, but when I use it, I use it heavily... I have a nasty habit of building up a large number of tabs across a large number of windows... Right now, I have 71 windows worth of Firefox tabs, probably 5-30 in each. When I get overwhelmed, I use the Web Clipper to save the links to a dedicated Web Clips note category as a dedicated inbox for those, rather than the more focused inbox of internally generated ideas.

I agree that some love to the extension would be good; I like what else I am hearing in this thread with regards to upgrades and features; I don't have a lot of feedback into what those should be as I need to grow my use of it as I evolve in my use of Trilium.