README.md

Clear Highlight Selection Bookmarklet

What is it?

TL;DR

A bookmarklet to help me combat a bad habit of highlighting words as I read them (sometimes as few as 3 words per high-lit chunk)

TL

For those who don't remember the glory days of bookmarklets, they are basically browswser plugins implemented before there were extension marketplaces. This one in particular removes background-color from selections.

See this contrived use-case for a semantic blockquote:

I don't expect it'll help many others, but it will help speed up my productivity, especially with learning from online articles.

You see, I've noticed a compulsion of mine worsening over time. When reading informational content, such as news or turorials, I'm developing an extremely limiting habit of highlighting every "chunk" of information sequentially.

-- Todd Pressley "Stream of Consciousness"

It depends on the density of the subject matter, as to how often I find myself highlighting and at what "chunk" size. For example, in javascript tutorials, I don't highlight much at all; however, I highlight very frequently (sometimes as much as 3 words per chunk) when reading a technical article from nasa, say one confirming the presense of water on sunlit surfaces of the moon (link to youtube video release), or learning functional reactive programming techniques in Haskell.

Installation

To install the highlight clearer bookmarklet, visit the codepen and drag the bookmarklet link to your bookmarks bar: https://codepen.io/toddpress/full/vYKpwNx.

Alternatively, you can just create a new bookmark, and then edit its location to the following:

javascript:var sheet = (function() {var style = document.createElement('style'); style.appendChild(document.createTextNode('')); document.head.appendChild(style); return style.sheet;})();sheet.insertRule('*::selection { background-color: transparent !important; }', 0);

Here's the unformatted code.

Make (I can't figure out how to get the bookmarklet link to work in github flavored MD)

Here's the formatted code:

javascript: var sheet = (function () {
  var style = document.createElement("style");
  style.appendChild(document.createTextNode(""));
  document.head.appendChild(style);
  return style.sheet;
})();
sheet.insertRule("*::selection { background-color: transparent !important; }", 0);