The extension now speaks 52 languages, and it highlights in all of them. Chinese, Japanese and Thai words get found inside normal sentences. Arabic matches with or without vowel marks. Turkish's two i's, German's ß, and accents stored either way all match now. There is a Language picker in Settings if you do not want it following your browser.
Words broken up by the page itself still match: half the name bolded, an invisible hyphen in the middle, a non-breaking space. The highlighter reads straight across the seam.
It works the moment you install it, including on tabs you already had open. No more reloading every page first.
Typing Japanese, Chinese or Korean into our own boxes finally behaves. Pressing Enter to finish composing a word no longer swallows it, and lists pasted with Chinese or Arabic commas split properly.
Norwegian now shows in Norwegian. The translation was complete all along, it just never loaded because of a language code mismatch.
The popup was showing a blank where the match count, the sample word and the plus sign should be, in every language including English. It shows them again.
Fuzzy matching used to silently drop any keyword without letters in it. Dates, phone numbers, order IDs and prices stopped matching altogether once you turned it on. They match again, and a price like $1,299.00 highlights in full instead of losing its dollar sign.
Per-word colours work again on pages that separate words with a non-breaking space or hide a soft hyphen inside them.
One bad pattern in a list no longer silences every other pattern in that list, and the warning now names the one at fault. A runaway pattern can no longer lock up a tab either.
Turning the extension off on a site now covers the boxes embedded inside that page, not just the page itself. A mistyped zone selector no longer silently stops all highlighting on a site.
Buying Pro now switches your lists back on. If your trial ended and paused some lists, paying used to leave them paused, which was the worst possible moment for it.
Restoring a backup no longer wipes your licence. Before, restoring a backup made before you paid quietly dropped you to the free plan.
Exported backup files no longer contain your licence key or your Notion and Airtable token, so a file you send a teammate carries only your lists.
Sync used to measure list sizes in the wrong unit, so lists in Chinese, Japanese, Arabic or Hindi looked about a third of their real size. Chrome then refused the save and sync did nothing at all, without saying so. It now syncs list by list and tells you plainly if one will not fit.
Turning sync off now removes your lists from your browser account instead of only flipping a switch, and it tells you if that did not work.
The daily automatic backup now actually runs. Its timer restarted every time Chrome started, so if you close your browser at night it had never once run.
A remote list refreshing in the background can no longer overwrite edits you made while it was loading.
Long PDFs no longer eat memory until the tab dies. Every page you scrolled past used to be kept in full, so a 100 page document could pass 2GB. Pages are released once you are well past them and redrawn if you scroll back.
PDFs saved on your own computer can be opened now. The viewer was using a method that cannot read local files at all, so it always failed. Saying no to the permission request no longer leaves a button that does nothing either.
The PDF viewer no longer looks dimmed. An empty panel was sitting over the whole page, so the document went grey and every highlight underneath turned to mud.
Highlights in a PDF sit around the word properly now. The colour used to cover the word instead of going behind it, and the word sat high in its own highlight with a gap underneath. It now reads like a highlighter pen on paper: the printed text stays sharp, with the same amount of colour above and below.
Landing on a PDF now tells you it can be highlighted. The toolbar icon shows a PDF badge, so you do not have to already know the feature exists.
Deleting a list is no longer final. It moves to a trash in Settings, waits 30 days, and comes back with one click, exactly as it was. Free for everyone, because losing lists should not be a thing that happens here.
Every confirmation box is now the extension's own: smooth, themed, and the safe button is focused first. The page holds still behind open dialogs, list cards glide open instead of snapping, and everything answers the keyboard.
Dark mode fixes. The delete button on a list used to turn into a solid brown square and hide its own trash icon, and buttons could not reach the contrast minimum. Both look right now.
Buttons stop wrapping onto several lines. Get Pro, Dismiss, Cancel and the guide link were locked to the width of the English word "Cancel", which looked broken in most languages and in English too. The name Highlight Keywords also no longer reads backwards in Arabic, Persian and Hebrew.
On Google Docs, Sheets and Slides the popup now explains that those sites draw text like an image, so nothing can highlight there. Better an honest reason than a mysterious zero. Sites built from modern widget shells get highlighted out of the box.
Select text on any page and press Alt+A to put it straight into a list. No right-click, no popup. And adding a word now says so on the page: "Added to Work", or "Already in Work" if it was there, instead of the silence it used to give you.
Desktop alerts now actually appear. The extension was asking the browser to show them with a bad icon address, so the browser refused every one and drew nothing. Nobody ever saw an alert. The optional sound had its own problem and only played if a second alert arrived while the first was still on screen; it plays every time now.
Your lists are safer when two Settings tabs are open. Saving in one used to be able to wipe out what you had just done in the other. Now the second tab is stopped and told to reload, so nothing disappears without you seeing it.
Words sitting next to a small tag, like an app name beside its \u201cAPP\u201d badge in Slack, are highlighted properly. They were being read as one long made-up word, so neither half matched. The same fix covers nav bars and rows of small labels.
Every matching option now explains itself. A line under the row says what the list is doing in plain words, and a small i next to each option opens a short explanation with a real example.
Share links are about six times shorter. A list of 221 names used to make a link that chat apps broke across several lines. Links people already sent still open.
The message that pops up after an action sits in the middle of the screen where it belongs, and stays long enough to actually read.
If you change your lists in one Settings tab, another open tab now picks the change up on its own instead of quietly refusing to save. It only asks when there is unsaved work it would throw away.
A list name is no longer cut off. The box grows with the name and outlines when you hover it, so it is clear you can type over it.
Remote lists from Airtable and Notion used to stop after the first 100 rows without saying so. They now fetch everything, and if a list is still short you get told rather than left thinking it is complete.
A search pattern that could freeze the page for ten seconds is now refused before it can run. Everyday patterns like \d{4} or INV-\d+ are unaffected.
A list of 20,000 words used to lock the tab for over seven seconds every time a page loaded. It now takes about a fifth of a second.
Backup files no longer contain your Airtable or Notion access key. If you already have backup files saved, change those keys.
Resetting everything now clears the synced copy too, keeps one snapshot so you can undo it, and refuses to say it worked if the cloud copy could not be cleared.
Restoring a backup now saves what was there first, so picking the wrong snapshot is no longer final.
Sync now tells you when it fails instead of looking healthy. It also checks Chrome's storage limits before writing, so a big set of lists no longer fails silently.
Every setting on the list editor explains itself, in all 52 languages, and a line under the row says what the list is doing right now.
1.9.05 changes
The highlighter changed how it paints. It used to wrap words in its own little tags, which some app-like sites (Slack, for one) reacted badly to, sometimes crashing a whole panel. Now it paints color over the text without touching the page's structure at all. Pages can't break because of us anymore.
The look changed with it: highlights sit squarer on the text, and the Box, Bold and Italic looks retired since the new painting method can't do them. Five looks remain, and existing lists were moved over automatically.
A keyboard shortcut flips the whole extension on and off: Alt+Shift+H, changeable at chrome://extensions/shortcuts.
The settings page got a proper redesign: a row of color circles with a custom-color picker that takes hex codes, cleaner look chips, and a tidier "More options" section.
A welcome page after install, and more security tightening around licensing and remote list credentials.
1.8.05 changes
PDFs work now, on Pro. Open one and your lists run on it like any normal page: the colors, the counts, click a word to copy it. It uses a built-in viewer, which you start from the popup on a PDF tab, or by right-clicking a PDF link.
Added Insights, on Pro. It shows where your words keep turning up: how many matched each day, which sites, which lists. It only ever stores site names and numbers, keeps them 90 days on your own machine, and you can switch it off or wipe it whenever you want.
You can hand off a single list now. Save it to a file, or copy a link that opens a small page with an Add button. A shared list you bring in sits next to your own lists. It never overwrites them.
Fuzzy matching catches more typos. Any single slip in a word now counts: a wrong letter, a missing one, a doubled one, or two letters that swapped places. So "flaged" finds "flagged".
Fuzzy matching stopped being a mystery. The demo and the settings both tell you about the five-letter minimum, so you are not left wondering why a short word did nothing.
1.7.03 changes
You can try Pro free for 14 days. One button, no card. If you reinstall, the trial picks up where it left off.
The free plan is 2 lists now, down from 3. Desktop alerts and remote lists became Pro.
Nothing gets deleted when a trial ends. The extra lists just pause, and one click with Pro brings them straight back.
1.6.02 changes
Night mode. Follow your system, or force light or dark in Settings.
A feedback form built into the extension, and a switch for the little mascot animations.
1.5.12 changes
The mascots move now. The pen blinks and waves, the marker swipe draws itself in, and the party pen throws confetti.
Added a switch to turn those animations off. If your system asks for less motion, they hold still on their own.
1.5.02 changes
List icons. 28 thin hand-drawn icons sit in the color picker, and the one you pick takes the place of the letter avatar.
If you only keep one list, "Add to" shows right in the right-click menu instead of hiding in a submenu.
1.4.05 changes
Fuzzy matching arrived on Pro. A word still matches when one letter is off.
Per-word colors inside a list, with the text color picked so each word stays readable.
A visual regex builder that runs on sample text as you build the pattern.
Two more remote sources: Notion databases and Airtable tables.
A small "7 of 34" counter while you jump between matches.
1.3.04 changes
Counts everywhere. A number on the toolbar icon, per-list counts in the popup, colored ticks down the edge of the page, and an overview panel right on the page.
Desktop alerts, one per list, that fire when a list matches a page.
A new Dim look for words you want to fade instead of light up, plus a Job hunt template pack.
A roomier popup, smoother animations, and a feedback mascot that changes shape without shoving the rest of the page around.
1.2.04 changes
Tightened up the licensing. The Pro state is signed and re-checked now and then, so a casual edit to the stored data does not switch it on.
Whole-word matching became the default, and a match in the middle of a word stopped splitting the word apart.
A bug-report and suggestion form that asks for a reply email.
More security work: checks on link types, limits on how much a remote list can pull, and a strict content policy.
1.1.01 change
Renamed to Highlight Keywords. Added a free plan and a one-time Lifetime Pro through Gumroad.
1.0.01 change
The first release. Automatic highlighting from your word lists, readable auto-contrast colors, the honeycomb color picker, click a word to copy it with a little spark, site rules, and backups.