Anchoring notes to text

An ordinary sticky sits at fixed coordinates on the page. An anchored sticky is tied to a piece of the page’s content — a paragraph, a code block, a sentence you selected — and moves with it as the page reflows.

Anchoring a selection

Select some text. A small Add note button appears just above the selection. Click it and you get a sticky bound to those words, with the passage highlighted.

Anchoring an existing sticky

Drag a sticky over the part of the page you want it attached to, hover it, and click the anchor icon in its toolbar. Click the icon again to unanchor and go back to free-floating.

An anchored sticky shows a small amber dot in its top-right corner when you’re not hovering it.

Why it isn’t offered everywhere

Anchoring only works if the page’s structure is stable between visits. On a page that rebuilds itself constantly, an anchor has nothing dependable to hold onto, so Pagenail doesn’t offer the feature rather than offering one that breaks.

A page qualifies if either is true:

• Its site is on Pagenail’s built-in list of stable reference sites — MDN, Wikipedia, the Python/Rust/Go documentation, Kubernetes, AWS docs, PostgreSQL, git-scm.com, and others in that vein
• The page holds still. Pagenail watches it for three seconds after load and allows anchoring if it changes very little in that time

If neither holds, the Add note button won’t appear on selection and the anchor icon won’t be in the sticky toolbar. Everything else works normally.

When an anchor is lost

If you come back and the passage is gone — the article was rewritten, the docs were restructured — the anchor is marked lost. The sticky is still there with its text intact; it falls back to sitting where it last was, and the anchor icon dims with the tooltip Anchor lost — click to re-anchor.

Click it to bind the sticky to whatever is now underneath it.

Jumping to an anchored note

From the dashboard, Visit page on an anchored note opens the page and scrolls to the note, flashing it briefly so you can find it.