Turn A Browser Tab Into A Temporary Note Pad With This Line Of Text

Running a blog has a lot of perks, one of which is being able to live most of your life in a browser without ever needing anything else to get your job done. Sure, native apps help for a lot of things but 90 percent of the time I’m just jumping around a dozen browser tabs. Something I need, but often find myself without, is quick access to a scratchpad. Somewhere to write something down really quickly, and then move on. Opening an app to do that, filing it in a system like Evernote, especially when it’s something as simple as a quick phone number, is pointless.

Thanks to this quick hack form Jose Jesus Perez Anguinaga, you can now turn a browser window or tab into a quick scratch pad or note pad with one quick line of code in a browser’s URL bar. It works in Chome, Safari, and most modern day browsers:

data:text/html, <html contenteditable>

I know, it looks scary, and unless you’re a developer you’re probably gonna have a hard time remembering it. So, to solve that problem, you could bookmark the page. You could set up a Text Expander snippet, or even a text replacement setting in the Language & Text section of your System Preferences. I set it up as a Text Expander snippet, but that’s just how I prefer to roll.

For the record, this is a scratch pad. It won’t save. It won’t sync. It will, ultimately, end up disappearing in one way or another. Use it wisely.

Joshua is the Content Marketing Manager at BuySellAds. He’s also the founder of Macgasm.net. And since all that doesn’t quite give him enough content to wrangle, he’s also a technology journalist in his spare time, with bylines at PCWorld, Macworld and TechHive.