Quickly Save Text From The Web To Your Desktop [OS X Tips]

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Click to see animation.
Click to see animation.

Ever been surfing the web and find a nice bit of text you want to save? You can highlight the text with your cursor, copy, and paste into an app like Text Edit or Notes, sure, but maybe you just want a quick and easy way to put the bit of text aside to use later.

There’s no need to bother with opening an app and pasting in the text in OS X. Text clipping has been around for quite a while, but it’s a feature that we rarely use, for one reason or another.

You can of course click and drag any image out of a web browser to your hard drive, and text clipping is basically the same idea, only with text.

Highlight, click, drag.
Highlight, click, drag.

Launch your web browser, and find a paragraph or two of text you want to quickly save to your Desktop. Double click on the first word in the paragraph and then drag your cursor to the end of the text you want to clip. Let go of the mouse button or trackpad, and your text should be highlighted.

Make sure a bit of your Mac’s Desktop is showing behind your browser. If you need to, resize the browser window before you move on.

Next, click on any of the highlighted text and drag it over to your desktop. Now you’ll have a nice text clipping on your Desktop for easy access later. Just double click it to see the text you clipped.

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