Launching today
penciled
Highlight and take notes on any web page, kept locally
2 followers
Highlight and take notes on any web page, kept locally
2 followers
Select text on any website, pick a color, add a note. Your highlights come back when you return. Everything stays in your browser: no account, no servers, no network requests. Export to Markdown anytime. Free and MIT-licensed, for Chrome, Firefox and Edge.
Free
Launch Team
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Promoted
Hey Product Hunt 👋
I'm Marcel, a solo dev from Brazil. penciled is a small browser extension I made because I wanted to read on the web the way I read on paper, pencil in hand.
Why I built it
I kept losing the one sentence that mattered in an article. A bookmark saves the page, but not the part you cared about. The highlighters I tried mostly wanted an account, a sync service or a subscription, and I just wanted to mark text and find it again later.
What it does
Select text on any page, pick a color, and add a note if you want
Come back later and your highlights are still there
A notes page lists every highlight from every site, with search
Export everything to a Markdown file (penciled-YYYY-MM-DD.md, grouped by site and page). It's a plain .md file, not an Obsidian integration, but you can open it in any notes app
Works on dark sites, lets you pick your own colors, and can be turned off for any site
What's different
Local only. No account, no servers, no analytics. The extension makes no network requests. Your highlights live in your browser and never leave it.
It doesn't touch the page. Highlights are drawn with the browser's CSS Custom Highlight API, so there's no wrapping text in extra elements and the page keeps working as before.
Anchoring that holds up when pages change. If an article gets edited, penciled re-anchors your highlights. If it can't be sure where one belongs, it doesn't guess: it marks it as not found, so you can still read or delete it.
Open source (MIT). You can check all of the above yourself. The extension is built on penciled, a JS library for text annotation that you can drop into your own site.
Being honest about where it is
It's small, it's new, and it's free. No paid plan, nothing to upsell. There are known gaps: no PDFs, no text inside iframes or text fields, and no sync between computers (you can move highlights with export/import). Highlights are saved per page address, so if a URL changes they won't follow it.
What would help me most
What would make you use this every day? And if you try it and something highlights the wrong text or doesn't come back, I'd really like to hear about it, with the URL if you can share it.
Thanks for taking a look 🙏
Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/edpobhdkceoadekhpdagmnknocckaaje
Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/penciled-highlighter/
Edge: https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/addons/detail/penciled-%E2%80%93-highlighter-/abhbgdlbgleahgeodcifnpecikbdciml
Code: https://github.com/marcellosso/p...