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PopClip Extensions Directory / Notes & Knowledge Management / Jotaid

Jotaid

by Leeron Zhang
Save the selection to your Jotaid Inbox, with its source and time.
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Jotaid

Select text anywhere on macOS, click Jotaid in the PopClip bar, and the selection lands in your Jotaid Inbox — with the page title, link, source app and capture time recorded underneath it.

The part you selected, kept verbatim.

---

> Source: Safari · [The page title](https://example.com/post)
> Clipped Aug 12, 2026 at 2:30 PM

Every clipping is tagged clipping, so the whole collection is one filter away in the note list.

Requires Jotaid 1.1.3 or later — a Markdown notes app for macOS with backlinks, a knowledge graph and a co-occurrence matrix. The app does not need to be running: the clipping launches it in the background if necessary.

Options

In PopClip → Extensions → Jotaid.

OptionDefaultWhat it does
Keep formattingonSends Markdown when the source app offers rich text, so links and emphasis survive. Off = always plain text.
Include sourceonAdds the page title, link and app name to the footnote. Off = the selection alone.
Edit before savingoffOpens a small window in Jotaid so you can fix up the clipping first. Off = saved straight to the Inbox. Needs Jotaid 1.1.4.

Edit before saving

Needs Jotaid 1.1.4 or later. On 1.1.3 the option is simply ignored and the clipping is saved silently, as it always was — nothing breaks, the window just does not appear.

With the option on, clicking Jotaid opens a window holding the selection. Edit it, then Save (or ⌘⏎) files it in the Inbox; Cancel (or Esc) throws it away. Either way the foreground goes back to the app you were reading.

The window only carries the selection. The source line and the timestamp are added underneath when it is saved — they are not in the editing area, where they would be deleted by accident.

Ticking Don't ask again in that window switches back to silent saving without going through the settings. To bring the window back, turn Edit before saving off and on again here in PopClip: Jotaid cannot read PopClip's settings, so a changed value is how it learns you have made up your mind again. That is the whole of it — there is no third switch hidden in Jotaid's own settings.

How it behaves

  • Nothing comes to the front — unless you asked it to, above. The clipping is saved in the background; you stay in whatever app you were reading. The tick in the PopClip bar is your confirmation.
  • Only https: source links are kept. The footnote renders the source as a clickable link, and a link that cannot be opened safely is worse than no link at all. A page on plain http: still contributes its title and app name.
  • Long selections are truncated, with an ellipsis marking where, at 20 000 characters.

Privacy

The selected text goes to one place: the copy of Jotaid installed on this Mac, over its jotaid:// URL scheme. Nothing is sent over the network, and no third party is involved — neither by this extension nor by Jotaid when it stores the clipping.

The script it runs (clip.zsh, about seventy lines) percent-encodes the selection, appends the page title, page URL and app name that PopClip provides, and hands the result to open. It shells out to nothing but od, tr, sed and open, all of which ship with macOS.

The source app's bundle identifier is sent along only when Edit before saving is on, and is used for exactly one thing: giving that app the foreground back once the window closes. It never reaches the note.

The link behind it

The extension is a thin wrapper over a deep link that anything can call — Shortcuts, Raycast, Alfred, a cron job:

jotaid://clip-note?text=<required>&title=&url=&app=&bundle=&mode=silent|ask

All values are percent-encoded. The app treats every field as untrusted: it strips control characters, collapses metadata to a single line, caps lengths and drops any source URL that is not a safely openable https: address. A missing or empty text means the link is ignored.

mode picks between saving silently and opening the editor; anything missing or unrecognised means silent. bundle is the source app's bundle identifier, described above — a value outside [A-Za-z0-9.-] is dropped rather than trimmed, since a truncated identifier names a different app.

Troubleshooting

Nothing appears in Jotaid. Check that the link opens at all:

open -g "jotaid://clip-note?text=hello"

A note titled hello should appear in the Inbox. If it does not, macOS may have registered a different build of Jotaid for the jotaid:// scheme — launch the copy you actually use once, then retry.

The PopClip bar shows a cross. The script failed. Run it by hand to see why:

POPCLIP_TEXT="hello" POPCLIP_APP_NAME="Terminal" zsh Jotaid.popclipext/clip.zsh

The Jotaid action never appears in the bar. The extension hides itself when Jotaid is not installed. Install the app, then select some text again.

Changelog

1.0 — First release: clipping to the Inbox with source and capture time, silently or through the editing window.

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Works With
Third-party product names and logos are used solely to identify compatible apps, websites, or services, and do not imply endorsement by the respective entities.