Link Text and Location Copier

About

Link Text and Location Copier is a Firefox WebExtension that helps you creating links right from the context menu. It copies a link’s text and location, the page title and URL, or selected text and page url as either plain text, HTML, Markdown or BB Code links.

It is heavily inspired by CoLT, one of my favorite add-ons, which will not be ported for Firefox 57. It is also my first attempt at creating a web extension, so I blatantly stole some code to make it work.

Translations

Link Text and Location Copier is currently available in English, Dutch and German.

If you want to contribute a translation, please get in touch.

Roadmap

• Add fancy icon
• Add more 'copy as' formats (Markdown, BBCode, what-have-you)
• Internationalization
• Come up with better name and/or icon
• Add documentation.
• Feature Request: Add support for Rich Text format
• Make configurable/Customization
  • Toggle local/synced storage (use export/import)
  • Make options page prettier
  • Internationalize options page
  • Import/Export settings
  • Conditional logic for templates
  • Further enhancements TBA
• Improve and expose test page
• Add support for copying (linked) images
• Make extension work in Chrome/Opera/Edge

Screenshots

Changelog

• 1.8.52018-12-26Styling and accessibility tweaks for options page, which now opens in a new tab.
• 1.8.12018-09-16Set accept attribute of settings import file input to filter for JSON files by default.
• 1.8.02018-08-28UTM-paramaters are now stripped from the copied link by default.
• 1.7.22018-05-25Fixes an issue where the link location was undefined for text selections when using %U.
• 1.7.12018-05-22Fixed a stupid bug where the values of %linktitle% and %linkurl% were the wrong way around.
• 1.7.02018-04-19Export and import your customized settings. Enabling editing of rich text.
• 1.6.02018-02-22Enables support for copying from inside an (i)frame. Adds %documenturl% variable.
• 1.5.12018-02-05Fixed a stupid bug where the values of %pageurl% and %pagetitle% were the wrong way around.
• 1.5.02018-02-04Added context independent custom format variables. Added option to disable context menu prefix.
• 1.4.52017-11-30Add option to disable encoding non-ANSI characters in link location.
• 1.4.42017-11-21Fix broken Cyrillic links by changing the order in which the templates get parsed.
• 1.4.32017-11-17Provisional support for Image Location added. Only works when right-clicking on a linked image, otherwise returns an empty string.
• 1.4.22017-11-15Added support for newline, tab and local time variables in templates. Variables can now be used multiple times in a template.
• 1.4.12017-10-23Added Rich Text support (for copying links to Word/Outlook/etc.).
• 1.4.02017-10-23Added support for custom formats. Add, remove and/or reorder formats from the options page. Changed icon.
• 1.3.12017-09-27Fixed a bug where “copy link text and location as …” copied the page location instead of link location.
• 1.3.02017-09-21Adds support for copying selected text and page title.
• 1.2.02017-09-18Internationalization. Added Dutch and German translations.
• 1.1.02017-09-14Added support for Markdown and BB Code.
• 1.0.22017-09-13In “Copy page title and location as HTML” the title and url were in the wrong location.
• 1.0.12017-09-11Icon added.
• 1.0.02017-09-11Initial release.

Note: Not all old versions are available on AMO. Versions with stupid bugs are disabled.

Known issues

• Before Firefox 56 the link title will always be “undefined”.
• Before Firefox 56 text selection is limited to 150 characters.
• The title and url of pages inside a (i)frame cannot be copied.
• If you have set the about:config preference dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled to false, this add-on will not work.
• Link Text and Location Copier will not work on XML documents, as these do not support document.execCommand(copy).

Custom Format Documentation

Easy as pie: with the variables listed below, create whatever format you need.

1. Including an image’s alt-attribute
2. When used inside a (i)frame, it will return the URL of the framed page.
3. Will return an empty string when unavailable.
4. \n. For HTML, you can insert <br /> into the template.

Options

• Don’t encode link location

  Firefox encodes non-ANSI characters (Cyrillic, Greek, Vietnamese, what-have-you) in URLs by default when copying. Links like https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Браузер get turned into https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%91%D1%80%D0%B0%D1%83%D0%B7%D0%B5%D1%80 when pasted.

  To prevent this, turn this feature on and save settings.

• Don’t strip UTM paramaters from link

  Some links include utm_-parameters, which are used to send tracking information to Google Analytics. Link Text and Location Copier strips these by default.

  To override this, turn this feature on and save settings.

• Don’t show context menu prefix

  By default, Link Text and Location Copier shows a “Copy … as ” prefix in te context menu before the menu label you set as custom format. This option allows you to overide this behavior, and uses the menu label as is in the context menu.

• Output as rich text

  Useful for copying links straight into word processors or email clients. For this to work, the custom format should be an HTML-string. (The custom format will not be validated.)

Credits / Acknowledgements

• Totally inspired by/based on Jonah Bishop’s CoLT. (license)
• The Copy-to-clipboard functionality is lifted from Firefox’s context-menu-copy-link-with-types example. (license)
• Thanks to def00111 for alerting me to the (i)frame issue resolved in version 1.6.0.
• The Paint Brush Icon made by Flat Icons is licensed under CC 3.0 BY
• The icons on this page are from Font Awesome, subsetted through the IcoMoon App.

Contact

If you have a feature requests or bug report, if you want to help out with translations, or if you just want to get in touch, here are a few options:

• GitHub
• @evilnickname
• E-mail