Trilium Web Clipper is a web browser extension which allows user to clip text, screenshots, whole pages and short notes and save them directly to Trilium Notes.
Trilium Web Clipper officially supports the following web browsers:
The extension is available from the official browser web stores:
Clicking the extension's button in the browser toolbar opens its popup:
The popup shows what will be saved from the current page: the note's title, which can be edited before saving, the website, and below them a preview, which starts with the page's description. A switch above the preview chooses what to save, among what the page offers:
#pageAuthor label of the note. When the page states
when it was published, that date shows under the author, marked by the icon, and is saved in the #publishedDate label
of the note. When it states when it was last modified, that date shows
below, marked by the icon, and
is saved in the #modifiedDate label.The description, marked by the icon,
comes from the page's description meta tag, or the one it gives
social sites. It can be edited or cleared before saving, or written in
when the page has none, and is saved in the #pageDescription label
of the note. Clippings saved with the keyboard shortcuts or the context
menu, screenshots and images included, get the description as the page
gives it. Each clipping that brings a description updates the label.
The popup opens on the selection if there is one, otherwise on Page, showing the article, or the whole page when the page has no article. On a page that shows nothing to save, it opens on Bookmark and says so. The keyboard shortcuts and the context menu still save right away, without a preview: saving the whole page that way saves the article, or the whole page when the page has no article.
Pages the extension cannot access (the browser's own pages, the extension stores, and pages that were open before the extension was installed until they are reloaded) cannot be saved or captured, so the popup says so in place of the preview, and only Tabs remains available there.
Below the preview, a row of buttons offers the other actions: Crop (a screenshot of an area you select), Screenshot (of the visible part of the page) and Tabs (saves the links of every tab in the current window as a list). Hovering over a button shows its full name and, if it has one, its keyboard shortcut.
If the current page was already clipped, a notice at the top offers to open the note in Trilium.
If Trilium cannot be found, the popup explains why instead of showing the actions, with buttons to look for Trilium again and to open the options.
The bottom of the popup shows whether the extension is connected to Trilium, as a colored dot (green when connected, amber when the versions are not compatible, red when Trilium was not found) next to a description of the connection, followed by the buttons for the extension's options and for this help page. A button to check the connection again appears next to them when hovering over the bar, and stays visible while Trilium cannot be reached or is not compatible.
Trilium will save these clippings as a new child note under a "clipper inbox" note.
By default, that's the Day Notes but
you can override that by setting the label clipperInbox,
on any other note.
Further clippings of the same kind from the same page are added to the note created by the first one, even on a later day or after that note was moved out of the clipper inbox. The note stays where it is and is not cloned back into the inbox.
A YouTube video embedded in a clipped page is saved as a Link Previews embed, with the video's title and thumbnail. As with a link preview added in the editor, the video plays only when clicked. Other embedded content (such as videos from other websites) is not saved.
The popup's preview shows each such video as a chip with the YouTube icon and the video's short link, and leaves out the embedded content that will not be saved.
Keyboard shortcuts are available for most functions:
To set custom shortcuts, follow the directions for your browser.
about:addons → Gear icon ⚙️ → Manage
extension shortcutschrome://extensions/shortcuts
The extension needs to connect to a running Trilium instance. By default,
it looks for the desktop application on port 37840 of the local computer.
If the desktop application runs on a different port (for example because
it was started with the TRILIUM_PORT environment variable),
enter that port in the extension's options. The extension checks for Trilium
again every minute, or right away when pressing the refresh button at the
bottom of its popup.
It's also possible to configure the server address if you don't run the desktop application, or want it to work without the desktop application running.
To connect to a server, enter its address and your password in the extension's options and press Login to the server instance. If the server uses multi-factor authentication, also fill in Authentication code with the current code from your authenticator app (or one of your recovery codes); otherwise leave it empty. The password and the code are used only once, to obtain a token for the extension, and are not stored.
After each clipping, a notification in the corner of the page confirms that it was saved, with a link to open the new note in Trilium. If the clipping could not be saved, the notification says why instead:
The extension downloads the images of a clipping itself, so that they are stored in Trilium together with the note. If some of them cannot be downloaded (for example because the website refuses the request), the clipping is still saved, and the notification says how many images are missing. Those images keep their address on the original website: Trilium tries to download them once more if Download images automatically is enabled in Options → Media, and otherwise the note shows them from the website for as long as it serves them.
The notification is shown on the page itself, so it does not appear on pages where extensions cannot run (such as the browser's own settings pages and the extension stores).
Development versions are version pre-release versions, generally meant for testing purposes. These are not available in the Google or Firefox web stores, but can be downloaded from either:
web-clipper-extension.Chrome
trilium-web-clipper-[x.y.z]-chrome.zip.chrome://extensions/
Firefox
about:addons.trilium-web-clipper-[x.y.z]-firefox.zip.Some parts of the code are based on the Joplin Notes browser extension.