Text highlighting is the core feature of Highlite. Select any text on a webpage and instantly mark it with your choice of colors. Highlights persist across sessions and are stored locally in your browser, making it ideal for research, studying, documentation review, and content curation.
Key Benefits
- Multiple color options for categorization
- Highlights persist across sessions
- Works on any public webpage
- Instant visual feedback
- 100% private - stored only in your browser
Use Cases
- Academic research and studying
- Content review and editing
- Documentation annotation
- Article curation
- Code review on GitHub
Updated
How highlighting works
Pick the Highlight tool, select any text on the page, and it gets a colored background in the color you chose. A single selection can run across several paragraphs or elements: Highlite wraps each text node it covers, so the highlight follows the real structure of the page rather than a rectangle drawn over it. Hover a highlight to reveal its delete button, or switch to the Eraser and click it.
Highlights come back when you return
Each highlight is saved in your browser, tied to the page URL, the moment you make it. Reopen the same page tomorrow, or after a restart, and it is restored in place. Highlite records the position of the selection in the document structure, not a screen coordinate, so the highlight survives a different window size or zoom level.
Highlighting as a feedback tool
Highlighting is not only for reading. On a staging site, highlighting a typo, a wrong price or a paragraph that must go is faster than describing it, and the screenshot you capture afterwards shows exactly which words you meant. Combine it with a sticky note when the highlight needs an explanation.
What text highlighting does not do
- Highlights are attached to the page structure. If the site changes that part of the page, or the text is generated dynamically and differs on the next visit, the highlight may not be restored.
- Annotations are tied to the page URL with query parameters and fragments removed. Two different pages that share a URL, or one page whose content depends on query parameters, share the same annotations.
- Highlights live in your browser only. They are not synced to other devices or visible to other people until you capture a screenshot or export them as JSON (Premium).
- There is no search across highlights, and no list of every page you highlighted: highlights are found by reopening the page.
- Text inside images, PDFs opened in the browser viewer, canvas-based apps and browser-internal pages (chrome://, about:) cannot be highlighted.
Explore Other Features
Sticky notes
Place virtual sticky notes anywhere on a page. Move, resize, and color-code them to keep your thoughts organized — all stored locally in your browser.
Free drawing
Draw arrows, circles, and freehand marks on any webpage. Ideal for bug reports, design reviews, and visual feedback you can screenshot instantly.
Color palette
Organize information visually with five highlight colors. Yellow for key points, green for definitions, pink for questions — build your own color system.
Guides from the blog
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