wheelercj/stardown

Copy the web as markdown

Stardown

Copy the web as markdown

You can also install from the source code to get updates early or customize Stardown's output more than its settings support.

• Press Alt+C to copy a selection or a page's link.
• Press Alt+N to open a notepad that copying with Alt+C automatically pastes into.
• Right-click part of a page to copy it as markdown. Select before right-clicking to copy multiple parts.
• Copy links for all tabs. Select tabs first to copy links for only those tabs.
• Customize these features including keyboard shortcuts in Stardown's settings.

Privacy

Stardown will never sell any data to anyone, and does not collect nor send any of your personal data anywhere. What you copy with Stardown is stored locally in your device's clipboard and/or locally in Stardown's notepad.

Permissions

For why Stardown requests the permissions that it does, see ./docs/permissions.md.

Development

Contributions are welcome! Let me know (such as in an issue or a discussion) what you have in mind ahead of time if you think there's a chance it won't be approved.

Also, please read ./docs/develop.md.

Alternatives

You're welcome to make a feature request, and there may already be other software that meets all of your needs. I am not affiliated with any of the alternatives below unless noted otherwise and have not tried all of them; use them at your own risk.

Copy markdown links for pages without installing anything

You can use this bookmarklet I made:

javascript: navigator.clipboard.writeText('[' + document.title + '](' + location.href + ')');

Integrate directly with an editor

• MarkDownload was developed by an Obsidian community moderator. While Stardown is great for copying parts of web pages as markdown, MarkDownload is better for downloading entire pages, especially if you want to download directly into Obsidian. I use both Stardown and MarkDownload.
• Omnivore can save content in a variety of formats.
• linkding is a self-hosted bookmarks manager.
• Zotero is one of the best tools for saving and organizing research.
• Joplin has an official web clipper of its own.
• Send To Logseq is a browser extension that saves web pages to Logseq.
• github.com/webclipper/web-clipper can integrate directly with Obsidian, Notion, OneNote, Bear, Yuque, Joplin, and more.
• Obsidian Web Clipper Bookmarklet is a bookmarklet for saving web pages directly to Obsidian.
• Slurp is an Obsidian community plugin and bookmarklet for saving web pages directly to Obsidian.
• import-github-readme is an Obsidian plugin for downloading GitHub readme files directly into Obsidian.

Scrape websites

• Firecrawl is an API and SDKs for scraping websites and saving them as markdown or structured data.
• Reader-LM is small language models that convert HTML to markdown.

Paste structured data

• obsidian-ReadItLater is an Obsidian plugin that creates notes with specific structures from clipboard content based on where it was copied from.
• Advanced Paste is a Windows-only PowerToys feature made by Microsoft that converts clipboard content to other markup languages like markdown or JSON.

Copy web page links in other markup languages besides markdown

• url2clipboard supports HTML, Markdown, BBCode, Textile, AsciiDoc, MediaWiki, Jira, reStructuredText, LaTeX, Org Mode, and text.
• TabCopy might only be on the Chrome Web Store, but supports many markup languages including HTML, Markdown, BBCode, CSV, and JSON, and lets you create custom link formats.

Copy just a URL with a text fragment

• link-to-text-fragment was made by Google itself but is cross-browser.

Why use Stardown?

Unlike the alternatives listed above, Stardown is:

• Flexible. Integrates well with many workflows. Just copy part of a web page and paste anywhere.
• Converts more formatting. Stardown can convert almost any table to markdown or other markup languages, and can create markdown of videos that renders well in GitHub.
• Creates text fragments so you can link to specific parts of pages.
• Extensible. Stardown's custom code for converting between markup languages is designed to be extended for more markdown flavors and other markup languages.