Capturing to Inbox
The inbox is a capture surface for things you want to process later: links, files, voice memos, video, PDFs, web clips, and social posts. Get them in fast; triage them later.
Capture Input
A capture input at the top of the inbox view accepts:
- Free-text notes
- Pasted URLs (memrynote fetches the title, a snippet, and the full readable article)
- Pasted file paths
Press Enter to add. The new item lands at the top of the list as pending.
Readable Article Capture
When you paste a link, the card appears immediately with its title and snippet. A moment later memrynote fetches the page and extracts the full readable article — the main content, stripped of navigation, ads, and boilerplate — into the item body as Markdown.
Alongside the article it captures a property set:
title— the article headlinesource— the original URLauthor,published,description— when the page provides themcreated— when you captured ittags— defaults toclippings
When you file the item to a note, the readable article becomes the note body and these properties become the note's frontmatter, so a clipped article opens as a clean, attributed note.
Extraction runs in the background after metadata, so the body fills in within a few seconds. If a page can't be read cleanly (e.g. a login wall), the card keeps its title and snippet and the article body is skipped.
In the inbox detail view the captured article renders as formatted rich text — headings, bold, links, and lists — exactly as it appears in the note editor, rather than as raw Markdown. You can edit it inline before filing.
Drag and Drop
Drop files from your OS file manager onto the inbox window. memrynote:
- Copies the file into the vault
- Detects type (image, PDF, video, etc.)
- Creates an inbox item with the file as content
Multiple files dropped at once create one inbox item per file.
Voice Capture
The inbox header and inline capture input include a voice recorder. Click to start recording, click again to stop. The recording becomes an inbox item under the voice content type.
If voice transcription is enabled, memrynote transcribes the audio in the background — see Voice Transcription.
If voice transcription setup is incomplete, memrynote takes you to AI settings before recording.
Web Clips and Browser Extension
The memrynote browser extension captures the page you're reading straight into your inbox. Web clips appear under the clips content type filter.
Pairing
The extension talks to the desktop app over a local loopback connection — nothing leaves your machine. The first capture prompts memrynote to show an Allow / Deny pairing dialog; approving it issues the extension a token. Until paired, the popup shows a needs-pairing state.
Capture modes
The popup offers three ways to grab a page:
- Article — the readable main content, stripped of navigation and ads (the default).
- Selection — only the text you've highlighted on the page.
- Screenshot — a stitched full-page image, captured by scrolling the page.
Article and Selection land as text; Screenshot lands as an image attachment.
Keyboard shortcut
Press Ctrl+Shift+S (Cmd+Shift+S on macOS) to capture the current page in Article mode without opening the popup. A brief ✓ badge confirms the save. Rebind it at chrome://extensions/shortcuts if it collides with another extension. (The shortcut is Article-only — Selection and Screenshot need the popup.)
Offline queue
If memrynote is closed when you capture, the clip is saved to a local queue instead of being lost. The toolbar badge shows the pending count. The extension retries about once a minute and, the moment memrynote is open again, the queued clips sync into your inbox and the badge clears. The popup shows "Saved offline" so you know it's queued, not dropped.
Add & open
The popup's Add & open in Memry button captures the page and then jumps straight to the new item in memrynote's inbox. (When memrynote is closed the capture queues instead, and the open is skipped — there's nothing to open yet.)
Settings
Open the extension's options page (right-click the toolbar icon → Options) to:
- Re-pair or Unpair the extension (unpair clears the local token even if memrynote is closed).
- Rotate token — revoke and immediately re-pair to mint a fresh token.
- Port override — leave blank to auto-detect (ports 7849–7856), or pin a specific port.
Link metadata scraping runs when a capture or preview needs it. The desktop app keeps the heavier metadata scraper out of the cold inbox startup path so opening a vault does not load web-preview dependencies before they are used.
Social Posts
If you've connected social capture (e.g. saving tweets), those land in inbox under the social content type. The original URL is preserved so you can revisit the source.
Pending vs Triaged
Captured items default to pending. They stay in the active inbox list until you triage them — see Triage Mode.
Capture from Inside memrynote
You can also create inbox items from elsewhere in the app:
- Right-click a wiki link → "Add to inbox" (defers reading)
- Right-click a calendar event → "Add to inbox" (defers follow-up)
These are convenience actions for when you want to defer something without leaving the current context.
What Capture Doesn't Do
Capture is fast on purpose. It does not:
- Auto-tag items
- Auto-file into projects (use Triage for that)
- Send anything to the network (until sync runs and uploads encrypted state)