Notes — pinned to the second
Write while you watch. One list per video — notes, clips and screenshots — each keeping its timestamp, taking #tags and [[ideas]], and landing in your exports.
A note is a thought pinned to a second of a video. Press Note, type a line, press Enter — the timestamp is already filled in, and clicking it later takes you straight back to the moment. No key, no AI, no limit, and nothing leaves your browser.
Taking one
Three ways in, all of which do exactly the same thing:
| From | How |
|---|---|
| Alt+N | Anywhere on a watch page, without touching the mouse. The fastest one, and the one worth learning. |
| The Note button | In the pill just above the video's title, under the player — where your eyes already are. In fullscreen it follows you, floating at the top-left and staying faded until you point at it. |
| The Study chip | On any video row in the panel or the popup, beside Overview and Transcript. Opens in the same box those two use, so nothing on the card moves until you ask. |
Start a note. On the video you're watching, the video pauses and the timestamp appears —
slightly behind
where you pressed. That's deliberate: by the time you decide something was worth writing down, the moment has already gone past. Five seconds by default, and it's a setting.
Type and press Enter (Shift+Enter for a new line, Esc to abandon). The video resumes if it was playing — and only if
we
paused it.
One list — notes, clips and pictures
A note doesn’t have to be words. The same panel keeps three shapes of the same thing, in one list, in time order — because a clip is a note carrying two timestamps, and a screenshot is a note carrying a picture. There is nothing to switch on and nowhere else to look.
| Button | What it keeps |
|---|---|
| Note | A line at the moment you pressed, backdated a few seconds. |
| Scissors | A passage. Press it when the good bit starts — the video keeps playing — then End clip when it finishes, and say what it was. |
| Camera | The frame on screen, with the moment burnt into the picture. A caption is optional here: the picture is the content. |
Each row offers Download when it has a picture, and Delete, which removes the note and its picture together. One delete that means what it says beats three that mean slightly different things.
Clips, in a bit more detail
Nothing is downloaded or cut. A clip is two timestamps: playing one seeks to the start and pauses at the end, and that is the whole feature. No file is created, nothing is re-encoded, nothing is uploaded, and the video is never modified — which is also why it is free and has no limit.
The start is nudged back, the end is not. You press start once you realise the passage has begun; you press end once it has finished, so moving that would cut off the last thing said.
Marking the end first works. Mark it, scrub back to where it started, mark that — the two get sorted out for you.
It shows as a band on YouTube’s own progress bar, so you can see how much of the video the passage covers. Click the band to play just that part.
Scrub away and playback is yours again immediately. A clip stops the video once; it does not trap you in it.
#tags and [[ideas]]
Notes take a deliberately tiny bit of syntax, all of it typed inline so you never have to stop and fill in a second field:
| You type | What it does |
|---|---|
#optics | A tag. Tags appear as a filter bar above the list, and a click narrows it. "C#", "issue #4" and "#2024" stay ordinary text. |
[[refraction]] | A named idea. It links to the CONCEPT, not to another note — so two notes taken a month apart on two different channels meet at the same name. |
**bold** *italic* code | Exactly what it looks like. |
Ticks on the progress bar
On the video you're watching, every note is a mark on YouTube's own progress bar. Hovering one shows what you wrote; clicking it jumps there. It's the fastest way to find the bit of a lecture you reacted to — and it means a video you've worked through looks worked through.
Marks never appear during an ad. YouTube plays ads through the same player, so the bar is showing the ad's timeline, and a mark placed against it would be pointing at nothing.
Everything you've written, in one place
Study — the item in the panel's ☰ menu, or the same button in the popup's header — opens the course's Study view: every note you've taken across the whole course, grouped by video, in course order, searchable in one box. Each timestamp still jumps to its moment.
Notes belong to the VIDEO, not the course
Delete a course and your notes stay. Build a second, topic-scoped course from the same channel and the notes are already on the videos it includes.
They stay yours — and stay here
A course export is the syllabus and your ticks: it carries no notes, so a file you hand to a study group is not a copy of your annotations. Read them back under ☰ → Study, or download every one from Settings → Data. Exporting a course →
Where they live
In this browser, and only this browser. Notes are never uploaded — not even with an account, which today carries your limits rather than your writing. That also means Chrome erases them if you remove the extension, with no prompt and no undo.
So take a copy. Settings → Data → Download all my study data writes every note to a JSON file. It's worth doing occasionally.
Nothing here ever deletes them. Transcripts and Overviews are cached and get cleaned up on a budget, because they can always be rebuilt. Your own writing can't be, so it is exempt from every cleanup pass.
Can I turn notes off?
Yes — Settings (☰ → Settings in the panel, the sliders icon in the popup's header) has a switch per study tool. With all of them off, the Study chip doesn't appear at all and video rows look exactly as they did before.
Why is my note's timestamp a few seconds early?
On purpose. See “Taking one” above — the stamp is nudged back so it lands on the thing you reacted to rather than on your reaction. Set it to 0 in Settings → Notes if you'd rather it be exact.
Can I take a note from the popup?
Yes, but it won't have a timestamp — the popup has no player to read one from. Take it from the panel on the YouTube page and it's pinned to the second.