I built a Chrome extension tonight to solve something that’s been bugging me: Chrome’s Reading Mode gives you clean text but won’t let you copy any of it.
Clean Copy extracts the article from any page, strips the ads and sponsored content, and gives you a resizable reading panel right in the browser. You can copy the full text as Markdown, plain text, or HTML.
What it does:
- Works with your existing subscriptions — if you’re signed into a paywalled site, it pulls the full article
- Falls back to archive.today for pages you don’t have access to
- Auto-detects when you’re on an archived page and offers to clean it up
- Keyboard shortcuts for quick access (Option+Shift+R to read, Option+Shift+C to copy as Markdown)
- Light, dark, and sepia themes with adjustable font size and family
Runs locally. No accounts, no tracking, no data leaving your browser.
Open source and free: github.com/atmasphere/clean-copy
Built with Readability.js (Mozilla’s article extractor) and Turndown (HTML to Markdown). Quick prototype before dinner, finished version after. If you try it, I’d like to hear what breaks.