How to clip website content to Apple Notes on MacOS and iOS

In one of my last Medium posts I wrote about “Why and How I Switched from Evernote to Apple Notes”.

When choosing a note-taking app, one of the most important features for me was saving/clipping web pages. Not only bookmarking the URLs, but really clip the content.
I wrote in the article that it is very easy in the Apple universe, for example in Safari. But if you use other browsers, for example Vivaldi, Chrome, then the thing doesn’t work so well because you can only save links and not the whole PDF. I have been looking for a solution for that.

Solution for iOS

As described before, sharing in Safari is perfectly integrated:

But I struggled to find a satisfying option for other browsers.

After a lot of trial and error, I decided to write a shortcut that can then be called from the various tools. I named the shortcut “PDF2Notes”. The shortcut only works for URLs. Unfortunately it doesn’t work perfectly, because the title is not taken over completely and the name of the PDF is not properly set. Here is a screenshot anyway. Maybe someone of you has a tip how I can improve this:

In Vivaldi it is a bit difficult to clip/share a page. You have to go to the overview of all open tabs. Then you have to press-and-hold a tab and select “Share”. That’s not very clever, but it works. I would rather wish that Vivaldi made it easier to share pages or to call up the Share menu. Do any of you have a tip?

Solution for macOS

The shortcut is of course also available on macOS if you create it in the Shortcut app in iOS but I want to have a native sharing function in Vivaldi+Chrome. Unfortunately, the picture is similar here. Apple tools like Safari work great. But browsers like Vivaldi, while having a “Share” menu, can’t easily share a website as a note:

The function is in the same place in Chrome as it is in Vivaldi.

How to solve this? I was looking for a solution for quire a while and found an idea by asking ChatGPT! The idea is to leverage a really hidden yet very powerful feature in MacOS: create a keyboard shortcut in MacOS Keyboard Settings by calling menu entries automatically in certain apps! This is how I did it (MacOS Sonoma, Oct. 2023):

Open System Preferences:

• Click on the Apple logo in the top-left corner of the screen.
• Choose “System Preferences” from the drop-down menu

Go to Keyboard :

• Click on “Keyboard”
• Navigate to the “Keyboard Shortcuts…” button on the right hand side
• a new window appears that let you set system wide shortcuts

Select App Shortcuts:

• In the left sidebar, click on “App Shortcuts”.
• Add a New Shortcut by clicking the “+” button below the right pane to add a new shortcut.
• From the “Application” dropdown, select “Vivaldi” (or Chrome). This ensures the shortcut works only in a specific app. If you choose “All applications” it is used system wide — I decided to limit the usage to a specific app
• In the “Menu Title” field, enter the exact name of the menu item. You must type it exactly as it appears in the application’s menu, including ellipses if they are present — if you want to use this feature for other purposes. As Vivaldi has a second menu called “Notes”, you can’t simply use “Notes”. Choose the path to menu instead. MacOS has a notation with “->” to navigate to a specific menu item, thus for Vivaldi, you have to write “File->Share->Notes”
• In the “Keyboard Shortcut” field, input the key combination you want to use for the share function. I used COMMAND+OPTION+CONTROL+S.
• confirm every dialog with “Done”.

Repeat the same procedure for Chrome. Now, if you’re in Vivaldi and Chrome, you can clip a bookmark of the currently opened page to Apple Notes!

If you want to add a keyboard shortcut to the Shortcut “PDF2Notes” in the Shortcuts app, go to the app and double click the shortcut. On the right side, you can assign a keyboard shortcut (I use COMMAND+OPTION+CONTROL+P):

Unfortunatly 1, the above mentioned issue with the naming of the PDF and the note remains until I find a proper solution in the “PDF2Notes” shortcut implementation.

Unfortunately 2, it is not working if the focus is on the web page. You have to click in the URL bar (Vivaldi+Chrome: CMD+L). So, if you’re browsing in Vivaldi and you did the config as described above, Use CMD+L followed by CMD+OPTION+CONTROL+P to send the PDF to Notes. The browser may ask you whether the shortcut is allowed to access the page and print it …

Summary

It is possible to clip content and bookmarks in your iOS and MacOS browsers to Apple Notes. It is not as convenient as you expect it to be and it requires some configuration, but you get the job done with some manual configuration.
If Safari is your standard tool for web browsing, you’re done. Sharing content to Apple Notes in different formats (Bookmark, PDF, …) is a first-class citizen to Apple browsers on MacOS and iOS.

If you have any recommendations to this topic, you’re welcome to leave a comment below! Thanks for reading.