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💡 The Big Idea: The Obsidian Web Clipper Works Best When You Use It to Capture Ideas, Not Articles

Last week, I published a video on how to use the Obsidian Web Clipper. The whole point of the video is that most of what we clip never gets looked at again, so we should clip a lot less and focus on the ideas, not the text.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the collector’s trap: PKM tools have made collecting almost effortless, and the more you add to your vault, the more productive you feel. The Web Clipper is a really good example of this, as clipping articles seems like it would give you lots of quality material to work with inside your Obsidian vault. But what likely happens instead is that you end up with a well-organized pile of articles that you’re never going to read.

In this newsletter, I want to walk through how to use the Obsidian Web Clipper so that doesn’t happen.

Why the Web Clipper Is So Easy to Misuse

The purpose of a Web Clipper is pretty straightforward: to clip things from the web that you want to save for later. You’re reading an interesting article, and you think, “I want to remember this,” so you clip the entire thing so you can read it later. It feels good, so you do it again. And over the course of a week, you add a dozen other things to your read-later list.

This is how people have used web clippers for years. And now that Obsidian has one, it’s easy to replicate this behavior there.

But I’d advise you to take a different approach.

Obsidian was never meant to be your read-later service. It’s a place to develop your ideas. And when you use the web clipper this way, you end up just recreating your read-later list (and the giant backlog of unread articles that come with it) inside Obsidian.

And it has the same problem every read-later list has: the stuff that was clipped never gets processed. It just sits there, slowly becoming a source of guilt instead of a source of new ideas. In the video, I call it a digital landfill, and I stand by that.

At its core, Obsidian is a tool for thought. But I see a lot of people treat it like an archive instead. They save the things that they feel might be important someday, and only go looking for them when they happen to remember them and want to dig them up.

Personally, I think the things you choose to keep in your vault should be the ideas you find valuable enough to actively work with. It shouldn’t be a collection of what other people have written. Your vault should be the place where you work with the ideas that you’re interested enough in to figure out what you think about them.

The ideas that make you think are the ones that are worth connecting and cultivating.

Web Clipper’s Three Capture Modes

The Web Clipper gives you three different capture modes. Here’s how each of them works:

1. The full article. This is what clicking the Web Clipper icon in your browser does by default. Defuddle strips the headers, footers, sidebars, and navigation, giving you a nice, clean version of the webpage that you’re reading. But I still believe that this should be the least-used mode and is overkill for 90% of the reading you do online.
2. The selection. Before you clip something, you can select the passage that made you stop and think and clip just that to your vault. When a passage is selected, the Web Clipper captures just the selected text instead of the whole article. This is significantly better in my opinion, letting you select and clip just the sentences that spark something inside of you.
3. The highlighter. This is the most valuable capture mode in my opinion, but it’s really easy to miss. Turn it on with the keyboard hotkey Opt+Shift+H (Alt+Shift+H on Windows), and you can mark up the article as you read by highlighting the text. All the highlights you add this way stick, meaning that if you come back to that page next week, your highlights will still be there.

There’s also one critical setting you should know about if you’re going to use that highlighter mode. In the highlighter settings, you get a couple of options for what actually ends up in the note that gets created:

• the full article with your highlights marked inline
• only your highlights, or
• the content with no highlights at all

My recommendation is to set this to replace the page content so that the Web Clipper saves only the passages you highlighted. That way, you can capture just the parts that really resonate, but you can still add the URL of the full article to the note properties so you can get back to it if you need to.

I’m a big fan of the highlighter mode, and that’s how I’d recommend you use the Web Clipper. Avoid capturing the full article whenever possible, as that’s a sign of the collector’s trap creeping back in.

One Question to Ask Before You Clip

There’s a big difference between clipping an article because it’s interesting and clipping the idea it sparked. The first is basically adding a bookmark so you can go back and read it later, adding to the guilt that comes from backlog piling up. The second is a valid reason to bring that idea into your vault and develop it further because it already has some creative momentum.

So think about what might actually make a note useful to you six months from now. It isn’t the clipped text in an archive so you have a copy of the original article. What’s valuable to future you is capturing what you were thinking when you read that article. That’s something you can use to create something new.

One way to filter this is to ask yourself a simple question any time you want to clip something:

What’s the big idea I want to keep?

If you have an answer to that question, go ahead and clip it, but write the big idea in your own words. If you can’t do that, though, don’t clip it!

More signal, less noise.

Use a Capture Template

Templates can be used to control what actually gets clipped and where it goes in your vault. So before you just start clipping, you’ll want to head to Settings → Templates → New template and set one up.

A Web Clipper template controls the name of the note that will be created, the folder it gets saved into, the metadata properties that get added at the top of the note, and the content that appears in the body of the note.

But more is not always better, so it’s worth dialing this in.

Here’s how I recommend you set this up:

• Note name - set this to so that it names the new note automatically from the article you’re clipping
• Location - your clippings folder (more on that in a second)
• Source URL - set this to , which adds the URL to the metadata (not the content) so you can always get back to the original article if you need it
• Author / published date - use and , which can be auto-filled from the article metadata
• Big Idea - Add a property to the template called big idea and leave its value blank. This acts as a prompt whenever you clip an article to type something in your own words in the clip window before the note gets added to your Obsidian vault
• Tags - keep it to one or two, and always add them by hand

But the one I really want to make sure you notice here is that big idea property. This shows up as an editable box in the clip window every single time you clip something and asks you to name the big idea worth keeping.

That’s the thing that makes the idea yours. Adding this by hand each time forces you to distill the information into something tangible that you can use in your PKM vault.

Where to Save Your Clippings

The last part of the Web Clipper setup is to set your template’s location to a dedicated folder in your Obsidian vault. I recommend you call it something like Inbox or Clippings.

The key here is to make sure that you process those things that you clip because the work isn’t finished the moment that you clip something. In fact, it’s only just begun, as you have to figure out how it connects to the other notes and ideas in your vault and how it can actually be useful. So this folder is a temporary holding area, not a permanent home. The clip lands here, but you still need to process it and figure out where it belongs.

About once a week, go through your inbox folder and decide what to do with each clip you’ve captured. Just make sure you touch each one and decide for yourself if it’s really worth adding to the collection.

The Bottom Line: Your Vault Is a Workshop, Not a Library

If I were to summarize my thinking about the Web Clipper into a single sentence, it’s this: Your vault is meant to be a workshop, not a library.

A library is an archive. It’s where you go to find a collection of words that other people have written. A workshop is where you go to create something new. And if you view your vault that way, it will drastically change how you use the Web Clipper.

— Mike

P.S. If you want to see the rest of the video this newsletter is based on, including my recommended template format, the quick access hotkeys, and the built-in Reader mode, check out the full video, which walks through the whole thing.