Web clipper

The Nimbus web clipper is a Chrome + Firefox (MV3) browser extension that saves what you read into your private, local-first Nimbus index — straight from the browser. A clipped article or selection becomes a nimbus:web_clip item, searchable alongside your Drive files, email, and bookmarks.

Everything stays on your machine: the extension talks only to a Nimbus Gateway running on 127.0.0.1. There are no remote servers, no telemetry, and no cloud calls.

Note

The extension is developed in its own repository, nimbus-agent/nimbus-web-clipper, and releases independently of the Gateway. It is a developer preview today — dev-loadable in both Chrome and Firefox; store submission is a follow-on.

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What it does

• Clip an article — extracts the readable content of the current page and sends it to your local index.
• Clip a selection — highlight text and clip just that.
• Related items — an on-demand panel surfaces related things already in your index, without leaving the tab.

Clipped pages are inbound — they write your local index, they do not send anything out — so clipping is not gated by the human-in-the-loop consent flow that protects outbound actions.

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Prerequisites

A running Nimbus Gateway with the web-clip surface (shipped in the Gateway). See Install for setup, then confirm the gateway is reachable with nimbus doctor.

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Pairing

Pairing is owner-consented: a token is minted only while you have explicitly opened a one-time pairing window on the machine running the gateway (invariant I30 — no window, no token).

1. On the gateway machine, open a pairing window and read the one-time code:

   nimbus clip pair --label work-chrome

   The code expires after two minutes. --label names the paired device; omit it and the gateway assigns one.

2. Open the extension’s options page and enter the code. The extension redeems it for a long-lived bearer token, stored in the browser’s extension storage — the only secret the extension holds.

3. List paired devices (label + token fingerprint, never the raw token):

   nimbus clip status

4. Revoke a lost or unwanted device at any time:

   nimbus clip revoke work-chrome   # or: nimbus clip revoke --all

Caution

The pairing window is in-memory only — restarting the gateway drops any open window (already-minted tokens persist and keep working). If a confirmation fails with a 403, open a fresh window with nimbus clip pair and try again.

The nimbus clip pair, nimbus clip status, and nimbus clip revoke commands above are the full gateway-side pairing surface.

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Install (developer preview)

The extension is dev-loadable today; build it from the nimbus-web-clipper repo:

bun install
bun run build      # → dist/chrome and dist/firefox

• Chrome: chrome://extensions → enable Developer mode → Load unpacked → pick dist/chrome.
• Firefox: about:debugging#/runtime/this-firefox → Load Temporary Add-on → pick dist/firefox/manifest.json.

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Where clips show up

A clip is a first-class index item, so it surfaces in ordinary search:

nimbus ask "what was that article about WAL checkpointing I read last week?"
nimbus search "WAL checkpointing"

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Where to next

HITL & safety How the consent gate works and which actions require approval.

VS Code extension The sibling editor client — ask and search from inside VS Code.

nimbus-web-clipper on GitHub Source, design docs, and the implementation plan.