What is "Highlight This"?

Get started with Highlight This

Click the button with the highlighting pen in your browser.

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Create a new word list

A word list is a set of words and options you want the extension to use. A word list can be configured to only act on some sites or pages.

To create a new word list, click on the "+" sign on the home page of Highlight This.

Synchronised or non-synchronised lists

When creating a list you must decide where you want your list to be stored.

If you only want the list to be available in the Chrome browser where you create the list, pick a non-synchronised list.

If you want your list to be available in all of your Chrome browsers where you are logged in, then you pick a synchronised list. Chrome will then synchronise your list and its setting accross all your browsers.

Standard or external list of words

When you create a non-synchronised list, you can decide if you want to manually manage a list of words directly within Highlight This! or if you want Highlight This! to download a list of words on a schedule. An external list can be downloaded from any publicly available source (such as pastebin)

Configure your list

Give the word list an appropriate name (e.g. Brands).

Define if you want the highlighter to highlight only complete words or if it should also highlight parts of a word.
example: if the word "mail" should only highlight exact match of word "mail" or if it should highlight "email", "gmail", "mailbox"

Specify the words to highlight

You can define words, phrases, any piece of text which Highlight This should highlight.
The wordlist is case insensitive. Any piece of text should be written on its own line.

The text can contain * and ? wildcards.
* is a wildcard for 0 or more characters
? is a wildcard for exactly 1 character
example: "m*l" will highlight mail or model, "m?l" will highlight mel, but not mail or model.

Set highlighting styles

You can set foreground and background colors for the highlighting. The easiest is to select colors from the proposed palette, but you can also choose your own by typing an HTML color code.

In the unlimitd version you can also set if you want the highlights to have round corners, extra spacing or shadow. And you can also define if you want the letters in Bold, Italic or Underlined

Define limitations

On the Limitations tab, you can define, per word list, on which sites, domains or pages the extension should highlight or not. To do this you can make use of whitelist where you can define on which pages to highlight and on the blacklist you can define on which sites the extension should never highlight.
You can define limitations using ? and * wildcards.

example: www.google.*, or *.google.*, or www.somesite.com/news*

Define the container for highlighting

As of version 6 you can define which zone on the page should be considered for highlighting. You can define this using a QuerySelector. To easy the building of a QuerySelector you can use other Chrome extensions that allow you to capture the QuerySelector such as : CSS Selector

Define advanced setttings

Highlight in editable fields

Per list of words you can define if Highlight This! should highlight words in editable zones (eg email body), be careful with this setting because the highlights will become part of the content you are creating.

Notifications

Highlight This! can notify you when a word of your list has been found on the page you are visiting. You can define to be notified once per page or on every time a word is highlighted, this is particularly useful for dynamic pages but can also result notification overload.

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Use Regex tokens

Highlight This! provides a basic support for Regex tokens. With the use of Regex tokens you have more granular control on highlighting based on patterns you define.

Activate Regex tokens

Open the Advanced tab in a word list to activate the user of Regex tokens.

Define your Regex tokens

In the word editor you can add Regex tokens to define what needs to be highlighted
If you want to detect tokens anywhere in the text, don't forget to uncheck the "detect only complete words" checkbox, otherwise it will only search within complete words

Some examples

• Highlight email addresses: ^([a-zA-Z0-9_\-\.]+)@([a-zA-Z0-9_\-\.]+)\.([a-zA-Z]{2,5})$
• Highlight car VIN numbers: ^[A-HJ-NPR-Za-hj-npr-z\d]{8}[\dX][A-HJ-NPR-Za-hj-npr-z\d]{2}\d{6}$

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Add words to a list by right click

Quickly add words to a list by selecting text in any web page, right click and select the list to which you want to add the word.

Only lists that are active on the page are shown to select from.

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Edit and delete a word list

To edit an existing word list, click the "edit" link next to the word list.

To delete a word list click the "delete" link next to he word list.

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Pausing

Pause a word list

You can temporarly pause a word list by clicking on the pause button or re-activate it by clicking the play button.

Pause all highlighting

You can pause all highlighting by switching off the extension. This is valid until you restart your browser.

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Define sites where never to highlight

Under the settings, you can define on which sites the extension should never highlight, it is a general exclusion list which takes priority on any other limitation.

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Backup/Restore

From the settings menu, you can also backup all your lists and settings. Do this on a frequent schedule to ensure you don't loose your lists. A backup will include your synchronised and non synchronised lists.

Backup

With the export function you can make a backup of all the Highlight This! lists and settings to a file.

The backup file is automatically download to your Downloads folder

Restore

You can restore your backups using the Restore button. When restoring you will be asked if you want to restore your synchronised or non-synchronised lists, if you have any of these.

Restoring will wipe your current lists, make sure to always make a backup before restoring a backup file.