Markdown URL Tag Bookmarklets

A year and a half ago I released mdut, a small utility for generating Markdown URL tags, because I did most of my writing in terminal based editors like Vim and Kakoune. In recent months I found myself writing far more in Ulysses, meaning I’m not already in the terminal during the process, and opening one up to get this functionality isn’t quite as convenient.

When I initially shared mdut with the world, Kirk said he wanted that functionality in the browser, and I briefly gave it a whirl, but gave up when I couldn’t get copying to clipboard to work. But then I also needed something similar for work recently, and found that just surfacing the text via alert() for manual copying was helpful enough, so I decided to make bookmarklets for this as well.

I mostly use the reference style:

[TODO]: https://nkantar.com/about/ "About | Nik Kantar"

The code you’ll need for the bookmarklet is:

javascript: (() => { alert("[TODO]: " + document.URL + ' "' + document.title + '"'); })();

There’s also the inline style:

[TODO](https://nkantar.com/about/ "About | Nik Kantar")

Its code:

javascript: (() => { alert("[TODO](" + document.URL + ' "' + document.title + '")'); })();

And finally there’s the Slack style, which is just inline without the title tag:

[TODO](https://nkantar.com/about/)

The code:

javascript: (() => { alert("[TODO](" + document.URL + ")"); })();

Clicking on the bookmarklet will result in an alert window with text you can select to copy for pasting wherever you please. Here’s an example:

If you’re not all that familiar with bookmarklets, this freeCodeCamp overview of them should get you pretty far, but the tl;dr is that you make a browser bookmark with the URL set to the code referenced above (or some other JavaScript snippet), and clicking it will then run said code. Pretty nifty!

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