Margin Notes

A Chrome extension to take notes on what you read. Select some text, right-click it, and add a note with a label such as Question, Correction, or Rephrasing. When you finish a page, open your notes from the toolbar, and copy or download them as Markdown or plain text for a colleague or an LLM.

It works on web pages, on local files that you open in Chrome (HTML, text, PDF), and on PDFs online. Nothing leaves your browser.

Install it from the Chrome Web Store: Margin Notes.

To run it from source, load it from this folder. There is no build step, so the repository folder is the extension folder.

1. Download or clone this repository.
2. Open chrome://extensions in Chrome.
3. Turn on Developer mode (top right).
4. Press Load unpacked and pick the folder that holds manifest.json.
5. Optional: pin the extension. Press the puzzle icon in the toolbar, then the pin next to Margin Notes.

Chrome keeps the extension until you remove it. After you pull a new version, press the reload arrow on the extension card.

1. Select some text on a page.
2. Right-click the selection and choose Add note to "…".
3. A small window opens with the selected text. Pick a label, write your note, and press Save note (or Ctrl+Enter). Esc closes the window without saving.

Select some text and press Alt+Shift+N instead of right-clicking. The shortcut keeps the line breaks of the selection.

• Change the key: press Change next to the shortcut at the bottom left of the notes page, or open chrome://extensions/shortcuts. Chrome owns shortcut keys, so they are changed there.
• Nothing selected: the window opens without a quote, for a note about the whole page.
• In a PDF: the shortcut cannot read the selection. Use the right-click menu.

Press the Margin Notes button in the toolbar. The notes page opens on the folder of the page that you are reading.

• One folder per page. The left column lists every page with notes, the most recent first. google.com/a and google.com/b are two folders. The part of the address after ? or # is ignored, so article?utm_source=mail and article#comments land in the same folder as article.
• Per folder: Copy as Markdown, Download .md, Download .txt, and Delete all notes.
• Per note: Edit (change the text or the label) and Delete.
• Download all notes (.md) saves every folder in one Markdown file.

This is what Copy as Markdown gives you:

# Notes on "We are launching our new product"

https://example.com/blog/launch-post

2 notes

## 1. Correction

> teh best tool

Typo: "the".

## 2. Question

> We leverage synergies to empower stakeholders.

What does this mean for a reader?

At: https://example.com/blog/launch-post#intro

The At: line shows up only when the note was taken at a specific spot of the page (an address with #...).

Each label has a name and a color. The defaults are Comment, Question, Correction, Rephrasing, Suggestion, and Praise. Press Edit labels on the notes page to rename, recolor, add, remove, or reorder them. Your labels follow your Chrome profile to your other computers.

A note keeps the label that it was saved with. If you later rename or remove a label, your old notes do not change.

The "Add note" item is not in the right-click menu. The item shows only when text is selected. If you just installed or updated the extension, reload the tab once.

The item is missing on a local file. Open chrome://extensions, press Details on Margin Notes, and turn on Allow access to file URLs.

The note window says the note was lost. Chrome was restarted while the window was open, so the selected text is gone. Close the window, select the text again, and right-click it.

The selected text lost its line breaks. Chrome gives the extension the selection as one line in some cases. Edit the note if the line breaks matter.

The shortcut does nothing, or the notes page says "Shortcut: not set". Another extension already uses Alt+Shift+N, so Chrome did not give it to Margin Notes. Press Change on the notes page and pick another key.

The shortcut opens a note without the text that I selected. Chrome does not let extensions read that page: a PDF, a Chrome settings page, or a local file without file access. Use the right-click menu there, or turn on Allow access to file URLs for local files.

Copy as Markdown did nothing. Click once anywhere on the notes page and press the button again. Chrome only lets a page write to the clipboard while it has focus.

• Your notes stay on this computer, in Chrome's storage for the extension. There is no server, no account, and no analytics.
• Your labels are stored in your Chrome profile, so Chrome syncs them to your other computers when sync is on.
• The extension never changes the pages you visit. It sees only the text that you select, the page address, and the page title, and only when you right-click Add note or press the shortcut.
• A copy or a download goes only where you put it.

The full policy for the Chrome Web Store is in PRIVACY.md.

1. Raise version in manifest.json (and in package.json, to keep them equal).
2. Build the upload zip. It holds only the files that Chrome uses:

   powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File scripts/packageExtension.ps1

   The zip lands in dist/margin-notes-<version>.zip.
3. Open the Chrome Web Store Developer Dashboard. A new developer account pays a one-time registration fee.
4. Press New item and upload the zip. For an update, open the item and upload the new zip in Package.
5. Fill in the Store listing, Privacy, and Distribution tabs. store/listing.md holds every text to paste, field by field, including one reason per permission and the privacy policy link. The images to upload are in store/images/.
6. Submit for review.

The store images are rendered from HTML pages in store/graphics/. After you change one, render them again (Windows, needs Google Chrome):

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File scripts/renderStoreImages.ps1

Requires Node.js. There is no build step.

npm install
npm run check

npm run check runs the format check, the type check, and the tests, which is what CI runs. Contributor and architecture notes live in AGENTS.md.

MIT. See LICENSE.