Copy URL Shortcut

The shortcut Chrome never shipped

I used Arc for years. Copying the current tab with ⌘⇧C became muscle memory, one of those tiny things you stop noticing until it is gone.

When I moved to Chromium after Arc was sunset, my hands kept hitting the shortcut. Nothing happened. The extensions I found were either always running in every page, or they rewrote the URL, or they came with a settings panel I did not want.

This is that one interaction. Press ⌘⇧C. The current URL is copied exactly. A small "Link copied" confirmation appears, then it disappears.

The permission you do not request

Most URL-copy extensions request <all_urls> so they can sit in the page with a key listener. That makes the toast easy and the privacy form long.

This one has no host_permissions key. The service worker wakes on the Commands API or the toolbar click, injects page-copy.js once with activeTab, and becomes idle again. Nothing is injected into a webpage until you actually copy its URL.

The URL is location.href as the page has it, including query parameters and fragments. No stripping, no https upgrade, no markdown wrap. Rewriting is a different tool.

Chrome already uses ⌘⇧C for Inspect, so the one-time assignment in chrome://extensions/shortcuts is required. After that, Chromium gives the extension shortcut priority.

Two clipboards, because Chrome has two surfaces

Isolated-world navigator.clipboard.writeText is unreliable. The page script copies through a hidden textarea, then mounts the toast in a closed shadow root so the host page cannot restyle or scrape it.

Restricted Chrome pages (chrome://, the Web Store, the New Tab page) cannot run an injected script at all. A naive write from the service worker fails there. Those URLs go through an offscreen document (offscreen + clipboardWrite), and the toolbar badge paints OK or !. The shortcut still does what it says.

The onboarding page, shown on install, states the data practice in one sentence: the extension reads the current tab URL only when you invoke it, copies it on your device, and never sends it anywhere. There is no remote code, no analytics, and no account.

What shipped

A 1.0.0 Manifest V3 extension with no bundler and no runtime dependencies. Permissions are activeTab, scripting, clipboardWrite, and offscreen. Twenty-one Node node:test cases cover the copy core and the manifest: permissions, CSP, web-accessible resources, the command binding.

The runtime zip is only what Chrome loads. README, privacy markdown, and the packaging script stay out of the package. Source is public under MIT.

Get the extension

The extension is live on the Chrome Web Store. If you want to try it, you can get it here.