Your highlights, back where you'll read them.

Highlights on an e-reader pile up in My Clippings.txt and are never seen again. Commonplace imports them, searches them by words and by meaning, and hands a few back each day. One binary, one database file, on your own machine.

Install Read the docs

Daily

About ten highlights a day. The ones you haven't seen in longest come up first; favorites come up more often. The set stays fixed for the day.

Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.

★ Favorite Add a note More like this Bury

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach.

☆ Favorite 1 note More like this Bury

userOct 24, 2026

Read this again before deciding about the move.

Search

Find a passage by the words in it, or by the idea. Each result says why it matched.

No exact word matches · 2 similar in meaning

Some things are within our power, while others are not. Within our power are opinion, motivation, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever is of our own doing.

similar in meaning

The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts: therefore, guard accordingly, and take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue.

similar in meaning

What it does

Imports Kindle and CrossPoint clippings Re-import any time. It skips what it has, keeps the final version of a highlight you extended or trimmed, and keeps your notes.
Searches by words and meaning together Meaning comes from a local embedding model in Ollama. Without Ollama, search falls back to words.
Keeps notes, favorites, and burials Write dated notes on any quote. Favorite what you want to see more; bury what you don't want in Daily.
Stays on your machine No accounts and no sync service. The web app listens on localhost, and cmpl backup writes snapshots safe for iCloud Drive.

Install

brew install --cask joshgummersall/commonplace/commonplace

For search by meaning, add Ollama and the embedding model (optional):

ollama pull qwen3-embedding:0.6b

Use

cmpl import "/Volumes/Kindle/documents/My Clippings.txt"
cmpl serve                     # http://127.0.0.1:8420

Keys

The web app is built for the keyboard, with vim-style keys. Press ? in the app for the full list.

j k gg G: Move between quotes, with counts (5j)
o / h: Open a quote / go back
/ gd gf: Search, Daily, favorites only
f b s: Favorite, bury, more like this
i cc dd: Write, edit, delete a note
yy u: Copy the quote with its source, undo

For agents

Read commands print JSON, so an agent such as Claude Code can work with your library. cmpl help documents every command. They never change your highlights.

cmpl search 'fear of failure' --limit 1
{
  "total": 14,
  "next_offset": 1,
  "results": [
    {
      "id": 412,
      "text": "We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.",
      "title": "Letters from a Stoic",
      "author": "Seneca",
      "why": ["similar in meaning"],
      ...
    }
  ]
}