Clipwise: Chrome Extension Demo

Try it: no install needed

Select a sentence in the article, then right-click it and choose Save selection to Clipwise, use the button that appears, or press Alt+Shift+S. The popup on the right updates live.

Essay · 4 min read

The case for writing things down

Most good ideas don't arrive fully formed. They show up as fragments: a sentence in a meeting, a paragraph in someone else's blog post, a number in a report. If you don't capture them, they're gone by the afternoon.

Writing is thinking made visible. When you write a decision down, you notice the assumptions you skipped. A short decision log saves teams from having the same discussion three times.

The trick is to make capturing nearly effortless. Save the exact words, keep the link to the source, and add a tag so future you can find it. Review your clips once a week and turn the best ones into notes.

Tip: on touch devices, select text and tap the button that appears.

Features

Clip in one gesture

Context menu or Alt+Shift+S. Saves the text, page title, URL and time, with an on-page confirmation. Duplicates are detected.

Tags, search and filters

Search text, notes, sites and #tags with accents ignored, highlight the matches, and filter by tag or site. Rename a tag to merge it into another.

Side panel per site

Open the side panel to see everything you have clipped from the page you're on. It follows tab switches.

Private summaries

An offline extractive summarizer runs in the browser. You can optionally point it at your own AI proxy; Clipwise never stores an API key.

Export and import

Markdown (grouped by site, for Obsidian or Notion), CSV that is safe against formula injection, and JSON. Imports skip duplicates.

Accessible, 3 languages

Keyboard friendly, screen-reader announcements, follows light and dark mode. English, Portuguese (Brazil) and Spanish through Chrome i18n.

Permissions, and why each one is needed

There are no host permissions and no content script running on every page. Clipwise only touches a page when you ask it to.

Permission	Why
`activeTab`	After you click the menu item or press the shortcut, Clipwise gets temporary access to that tab only, to read your selection.
`scripting`	Runs two tiny self-contained functions in that tab (read the selection, show "Saved"). Nothing is injected anywhere else.
`contextMenus`	Adds "Save selection to Clipwise" to the right-click menu, only when text is selected.
`storage`	Keeps your clips in `chrome.storage.local` on your device. There is no server and no account.
`sidePanel`	Shows the clips for the current site next to the page.

Architecture

UI pages

Popup, side panel and options, written in vanilla TypeScript with no framework.

sendMessage('clips/list', …)

Service worker

A typed message router, the context menu, the shortcut, and on-demand scripting.

createRouter(handlers)

ClipRepository

chrome.storage.local behind a typed repository that serializes writes and runs schema migrations (v1 → v3).

Typed end to end: one MessageMap defines every request and response, so handlers and callers are checked at compile time.
Tested: Vitest covers the repository and migrations, search, the export formats, the summarizer, the router and the background worker, using a chrome API mock. The same mock powers this demo.
Build: a multi-entry Vite build produces a loadable dist/ folder and a zip file, with a 4.8 KB gzipped service worker.
Safe by default: clip text is never rendered as HTML, the page toast lives in a closed Shadow DOM, and the router rejects messages from other extensions.