Augmented Browsing
Your wiki holds your thinking — but you do your reading on the web, where none of it is
visible. Augmented Browsing turns that around: with the Clip to MojoPad browser
extension installed and one switch flipped, pages you read in your browser quietly show you
where they touch your own notes. A phrase that matches one of your page names gets a
soft dotted underline — hover it and a small card shows your note's opening lines;
click and that page opens in MojoPad. Your second brain follows you around the internet.
It is off by default, and everything happens on your Mac — what you read is never
sent anywhere. More on that below.
Turning it on — two halves, two minutes
- Install the extension (once): Clip to MojoPad from the Chrome Web Store —
the same extension that clips pages. If you already clip, you already have it; just make sure
it's up to date.
- Flip the switch in MojoPad: open Settings ▸ Web Clipper (
⌘,) and
check Highlight my wiki's pages while I browse. Keep the wiki you want matched open —
its page names are what light up.
Then go read something. On a page that mentions things you have pages about, you'll see
the dotted underlines appear a moment after the page loads, and the extension's toolbar icon
shows a small count of the connections found. No matches on a page simply means none of your
page names appear in its text — see Getting more matches below.
Reading with it
- Hover an underline — a card shows the matching page's name, its opening lines, and
how many pages in your wiki link to it. Open in MojoPad jumps straight there; the
small ✕ on the card means never highlight this term again (undoable only by
turning the feature off and on).
- Click an underline — opens your page in MojoPad directly.
- Click the toolbar icon — a panel lists every connection on the page in one place,
with a Clip this page button (clipping works exactly as before) and Mute this
site for sites where you never want highlights (mail, banking, and the like). On a page
with no connections, clicking the icon just clips, as it always did.
Related by meaning
Exact name matches are only half the story. With Also suggest pages related by
meaning checked (on by default under the master switch) and your local AI running (see
Local AI), the toolbar panel adds a Related by meaning section: pages of yours that
are about what you're reading even though their names never appear in the text. A
short digest of the page — its title and opening text — is compared against your wiki's
semantic index by your own local model, on your own machine. These count toward the toolbar
badge too.
What gets matched, and getting more matches
- Highlighting matches your page names and aliases — not the body text of your notes.
A match means "you have a page about this."
- Short names (under 4 letters, adjustable in Settings) and single common English words
("Ideas", "Index") stay out, so the web doesn't glow everywhere. Daily-note dates and
encrypted pages never participate.
- Captured pages with site suffixes match cleanly: a page saved as
"Permaculture - Wikipedia" also lights up plain "Permaculture".
- The single best lever: aliases. Long page names rarely appear verbatim in the
wild. Give an important page a short alias (select the page ▸ add an alias like
"Zettelkasten" or "Maslow's hierarchy") and it starts matching everywhere. This is the same
mechanism auto-linking uses inside your wiki — augmented browsing simply extends it to the
web.
- Highlights are deliberately quiet: the first occurrence of each term on a page, a hard
cap per page, and never inside forms, editors, or code.
Privacy — the whole point
The design is one-way: your page names flow out to the extension; nothing about
your browsing flows back. Name-matching runs entirely inside your browser tab — the pages
you read are never sent to any server, and MojoPad keeps no record of them. The optional
related-by-meaning digest goes only to the MojoPad app on the same computer, where
your local AI does the comparison. Turn the switch off and the exported name list is deleted
on the spot. No server is involved anywhere, because there isn't one.
If you don't see highlights
- Is the switch on, with a wiki open? Settings ▸ Web Clipper ▸ Highlight my wiki's
pages while I browse — and the wiki whose names you expect must be open in MojoPad.
- Freshly turned on? The extension refreshes its copy of your page names every few
minutes — reload the page you're reading (or the extension) to pick it up immediately.
- No matches is often the honest answer — the page simply doesn't contain any of
your page names verbatim. Add aliases to your key pages (see above) and the web gets much
brighter.
- Muted this site once? Sites you muted stay muted. The mute list lives in the
extension; remove a site by clicking the toolbar icon on that site.
- Related-by-meaning empty? That half needs your local AI (Ollama) running and the
wiki's semantic index built — see Local AI.