Keeping things for later

Save a passage from a web page, a link, or a passing thought — without stopping to decide where it belongs. Sort it out later, when you are in the mood for sorting rather than for reading.

Keeping something

Keep something in the sidebar opens a short form: a title, where it came from, and what you want to keep. Only the last matters — a thought with no address is as valid a thing to keep as a quoted paragraph.

Below the form is a preview of exactly what will be saved, so a paste that came out badly is something you see before you keep it rather than after.

From anywhere in a workspace, k opens that form and keeping it puts you back on the page you were reading. Nothing is lost on the way there and nothing is left open behind you.

Keeping from another site

A copied passage does not carry the address it came from — browsers deliberately keep that from the page you paste into. So there is a bookmarklet: drag it to your bookmarks bar once, and pressing it on any page keeps what you have selected together with the real address. It is in the Settings gear on Keep something, under Keep from another site.

Pasting works too, and when the markup carries enough links to be sure, the form offers the site it thinks the passage came from. It offers the site and not the page, and only when the evidence is one-sided — an address guessed wrongly would be written into the note and stay there, so it stays quiet rather than guessing.

Where it goes

One folder or note in the workspace can be the one that catches these. The Settings gear on Keep something chooses it — or Change, at the end of the line that says where they go now. A note takes them as entries and a checklist as rows, at the top or the bottom; a folder makes each one a note of its own.

A folder's Settings tab can also claim the job with Catch them here. Call it Inbox, Clippings, To sort, whatever you like; the sidebar shows your name for it, not ours.

If nothing is set to catch them, captures go to the top of the tree and the form says so. Nothing is lost either way.

Sorting it out later

A capture is an ordinary note, so everything you already know works on it: it is searchable, it can be shared, and you can drag it into a folder when you know which one.

Its Settings page also offers two shortcuts while it is still waiting:

• Add it to a note — appended under its own heading, to any note you can write.
• Add it to today's note — the same note your diary makes on its own, in whichever folder makes one.

Either way the capture stays where it is. It is not moved or swallowed, so you can check it landed before deleting it. A capture that vanished into a note you had not read yet would be one you had to go through history to find.

Keeping the same page twice

If you have kept something from an address before, the form says so and links to what you kept. It is a note, not a barrier — a second passage from one article is a perfectly reasonable thing to want.

What this does not do

• It does not fetch the page. The address is a record of where a passage came from, not an instruction to go and read it. What gets saved is what you put in the box.
• Pictures go on after. A file attaches to a note, and a capture becomes a note when you keep it — so keep it first, then add the picture on the note itself.
• No browser extension or share sheet. The bookmarklet is the whole of it: nothing installs, and nothing runs on a page until you press it. A selection longer than about two thousand characters is too long to travel in a link, and the form says so and asks you to paste it.
• Captures are notes, so they count towards the workspace's note limit like everything else.