Link Maker, a Safari extension

I have long searched for a Safari extension that can create a link with a title or selected text from a webpage — something like the now-antique Firefox extensions CopyURL+ and QuoteURLText. The Mac App Store has nothing. But I finally found a useful extension: Link Maker by Chee@CMONOS.

Link Maker offers a vast array of choices for creating links. I configured the extension to create links in just two ways: with a page title or with selected text. If, for instance, I’m writing a blog post and want to link to Lindy West’s New York Times piece “What the White House Knew About Rob Porter,” I can point to the link, right-click, and choose HTML. If I’m reading the essay, I can right-click anywhere, choose HTML, and create a link. If I want to link to text from West’s essay, say, to the phrase “a promised return to some midcentury mirage of American ‘greatness,’” I can highlight that text, right-click, and choose HTML + text. I have added the quotation marks in these links by hand, but it would be just as easy to have Link Maker create links with quotation marks already in place. The menu choices HTML and HTML + text are mine: one could change those names to Link and Link with text, or to anything else.

Link Maker isn’t as efficient as I’d like: it’s still necessary to copy the link it creates to the clipboard before pasting elsewhere. (The old Firefox extensions sent stuff to the clipboard automatically. I’m not sure Safari allows that.) Still, Link Maker makes the work of creating links much less tedious. I’ll probably use my old standby aText. But I like knowing that there’s an extension that can more or less do what I was looking for. Thank you, Chee@CMONOS, for sharing your good work.

[After writing this post, I decided not to multiply entities without necessity. In other words, I’m still using aText to make links. But a link-making Safari extension is so difficult to find that I still wanted to give Link Maker some attention here.]