KMS Web Clipper (clip web pages and screenshots to the Vault)

What it is

Status: shipped. Clip any web page by URL — or a screenshot by OCR — into the Vault as a Markdown note. Zero copy-paste friction.

The Web Clipper lets you save web content directly into your Vault's Web Clips/ folder as a clean Markdown note with YAML frontmatter (source URL, timestamp, tags). It fetches the page, extracts the article with Mozilla's Readability library, converts it to Markdown, and creates a new note — all in one step.

For screenshots, it uses AI-powered OCR (Anthropic vision) to extract visible text from the captured image and saves that as a Vault note. This incurs a small API cost (one Anthropic API call).

Requires KMS enabled. All entry points are gated behind the nothariEnabled setting. If KMS is off, the Quick Launch tab is hidden, the CLI route returns 403, and the screenshot button doesn't appear.

Where to find it

The fastest path is Quick Launch — press your Quick Launch shortcut and switch to the Web Clip tab, whose URL field auto-detects a link already on your clipboard. A screenshot button is available from the same place, and there is a command-line route for agents.

How it behaves

How to use it

1. Quick Launch tab (fastest for URLs)

Open Quick Launch (Ctrl+Space or your configured shortcut) → switch to the Web Clip tab (scissors icon). The URL field auto-detects if your clipboard contains an http:// or https:// URL and pre-fills it. Optionally add comma-separated tags. Press Enter or click Clip page.

The modal closes immediately (fire-and-forget). The clip happens in the background. If it fails (unreachable URL, non-HTML page, no vault configured), a toast appears in the main window.

2. CLI route (for automation and agents)

POST /kms/clip
Content-Type: application/json
Authorization: Bearer <token>

{
  "url": "https://example.com/article",
  "tags": ["research", "ai"],
  "title": "Custom title (optional)",
  "vaultId": "optional-vault-id"
}

Returns 201 with { note: { id, vaultId, relativePath, ... } }.

Agents can call this to save research material to the Vault during a session.

3. Screenshot "Save to vault" (OCR)

Capture a screenshot with Omniscio's snip tool (Ctrl+Alt+S or your configured shortcut). In the annotation editor, click Save to vault (only visible when KMS is enabled). The button shows "Extracting..." while the AI reads the screenshot.

The OCR extracts all visible text and generates a short title. The result is saved as a Vault note in Web Clips/ with tags screenshot and ocr, and a screenshot://<recordId> source URL for provenance.

What the clipped note looks like

---
source: https://example.com/article
clipped: 2026-07-17T19:30:00.000Z
tags:
  - research
  - ai
---

# Article Title

*Author Name* | [Source](https://example.com/article)

The article content in clean Markdown...

The note file lands at Web Clips/<title> <YYYY-MM-DD HHmm>.md. If a file with that name already exists, a numeric suffix is added automatically.

Limits and safety

• URL validation: only http:// and https:// URLs are accepted. Private/local URLs (localhost, 10.x, 192.168.x, etc.) are rejected for SSRF safety.
• Response size: 10 MB max. Pages larger than that are rejected.
• Note body: 5 MB max (inherited from the note creation service).
• Fetch timeout: 15 seconds.
• Content type: only text/html and application/xhtml pages are clipped. PDFs, images, and other content types are rejected with a clear error message.
• Readability fallback: if the article extractor can't parse the page (JavaScript-heavy SPAs, paywalled content), the clipper falls back to plain text extraction.

Troubleshooting

Symptom	Cause	Fix
"Turn on KMS in Settings to use this tab"	KMS is disabled	Settings → Features → Enable KMS, then set a vault folder
"The URL does not point to an HTML page"	Non-HTML content type	The clipper only handles HTML pages
"Cannot clip from a private or local URL"	SSRF protection	Use a public URL
"The page is too large to clip"	Response > 10 MB	Try a lighter page or clip manually
"Could not clip that page" (toast)	Fetch failed or no vault	Check the URL is reachable and you have a vault configured
"Couldn't extract text from this screenshot"	OCR API error	Check your API key is valid and you have credits

Related

The vault the clips land in is described on the KMS page, and importing a whole existing note collection rather than clipping page by page is the KMS Obsidian Import Wizard.