How To: Get Started with Cricket Capture

Cricket Capture is a browser extension that lets you highlight articles on any website, save them as "smart bookmarks" with the title, author, date and link, and turn a good highlight into an email or X post. Everything stays in your own browser. There are no servers and no tracking, and nothing is ever posted for you.

1. Install it

The Chrome Web Store listing is still under review, so for now you install it from the cricket-capture.zip file:

  1. Right-click cricket-capture.zip, choose Extract All…, then Extract. Leave the cricket-capture folder somewhere permanent, such as Downloads, because the browser loads the extension from that folder each time it starts.
  2. In Brave, type brave://extensions in the address bar and press Enter. (These steps are written for Brave on Windows 11. In Chrome the page is chrome://extensions and the steps should be the same, but we haven't tested it there.)
  3. Turn on Developer mode (top-right switch).
  4. Click Load unpacked and pick the cricket-capture folder (the one with manifest.json in it).
  5. Click the puzzle-piece icon and pin Cricket Capture so its icon is always visible. Then reload any open tabs.

Using more than one computer? Repeat these steps on each one.

2. Your first capture

  1. Open an article and select a sentence or two.
  2. Click the blue ✎ Highlight button, or right-click and choose Cricket: highlight selection, or press Alt+H. The text turns yellow, and it stays highlighted when you come back to the page.
  3. Click a yellow highlight to add a note or remove it.
  4. Click the Cricket icon in the toolbar. The popup shows the title, author, date and link (type in anything it missed) plus your highlights. Add tags and any notes, then click Save capture.
  5. Handy for sharing: Copy as email copies a subject line plus the article details and highlights, ready to paste into an email.

3. Find and use your captures

  • Click the Cricket icon, then Open Library. It opens in its own tab.
  • Search words in titles, authors, highlights or notes. Click a tag to filter, and click it again to clear the filter.
  • Compose X post drafts a post from a highlight. Open in X fills it in, and you still press Post yourself.
  • Important: your captures live only on that computer. They don't sync between machines. To move them, click Export JSON (the file goes to Downloads), copy the file to the other computer, and click Import JSON there. Export now and then as a backup too, because removing the extension deletes your captures.
  • Need help inside the extension? Click ? How it works.

4. Bridge your iPhone and your Windows PC

Getting texts and links between an iPhone and a Windows PC is a pain. Our guide covers an iPhone Shortcuts automation that forwards new texts to your email automatically, and ways to send links from your PC to your phone: Cricket Messaging Bridge guide.

Say Hello and Chat with Cricket

Questions, ideas, or stuck on a step? Say Hello and Chat with Cricket.

~ge~

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