lakshaytalkstomachines / hili

Firefox extension to highlight and save text from the web

hili

Firefox extension to highlight and save text from the web.

Extension

To install (Firefox), open about:debugging and choose "Load Temporary Add-on", then select the manifest.json file. This is temporary (but useful for development); the add-on will be gone next time you run Firefox.

To install it more permanently:

If you're running Firefox Developer Edition, you should be able to:

1. Zip up the extensions directory
2. Go to about:addons, then Install Add-on From File, and select the zipped extension

Otherwise, the process is more involved:

1. Go to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/developers/addon/api/key/ (create a Firefox account if necessary) and generate credentials
2. Install web-ext: npm install -g web-ext
3. Navigate to the extensions folder and run: web-ext sign --api-key=<JWT issuer> --api-secret=<JWT secret>
4. This will create an .xpi file in web-ext-artifacts.
5. Go to about:addons, then Install Add-on From File, and select the .xpi file.

To install on mobile, the easiest way is to visit this url from your phone: https://frnsys.com/misc/hili.xpi.

Server

server.py launches a simple HTTP server that accepts any data at localhost:<PORT>/ and saves it to a specified file.

Basic usage is: python server.py <SAVE FILE> <UPLOAD DIRECTORY> [-p <PORT>]

For example: python server.py ~/notes/annos.json ~/notes/saved_files -p 8888

Make sure PORT is set to the same value in extension/hili.js (8888 by default).

Usage

Once the extension is installed:

1. Run the server, e.g. python server.py ~/notes/annos.json ~/notes/saved_files
2. Highlight some text on a page, and click the "Highlight" button that appears

I suggest running the server on system startup as a background process. E.g. you could add cd ~/hili; python server.py ~/notes/annos.json ~/notes/saved_files to your ~/.xinitrc or equivalent file.

You can also view your highlights by visiting the server address, e.g. localhost:8888

Listener scripts

If you want something to happen whenever a new highlight is received, you can do something like:

#!/bin/bash
ANNOS_PATH=~/notes/web/annos.json

tail -n 0 -f $ANNOS_PATH | while read line; do
    # do something here, e.g. pass $line to another script
    echo $line
done