If you find something interesting while researching online, your first instinct will probably be to bookmark the page for reference later. And that’s just fine, as long as you can find the bookmark later. And remember why you saved it. And don’t mind re-reading the entire page to locate the fragment you need.

Save Text To File is a Firefox add-on which could make this much easier. If you’re only interested in a paragraph or two of text, forget bookmarks, just select what you need with the mouse, then right-click, Save Text To File > Save, and your chosen words are saved directly to a local file.

By default every selection is saved to a separate file, each named automatically with the date and time (“HighlightedText–05-03-2015–10-58-28.txt”). That helps to group files together and find the snippets you need, but it can also mean your hard drive gets seriously cluttered.

Save highlighted text directly to disk from the right-click menu

Fortunately there are plenty of options to customise the file name, its date format, or maybe set a custom destination folder so that related snippets are kept together.

Better still, Save Text To File can append – or prepend – your chosen text to the same file. Browse this later and you’ll see each text selection in turn, along with the date and time it was saved, and the source URL. No need to go looking for bookmarks, or otherwise revisit all these pages individually, because everything you need is already right there. Give it a try.