Getting Started with Highlighty: Your First Five Minutes

Most people install Highlighty, run one search, and only later discover the part that actually changes how they work: saving a list of words once and watching all of them light up on every page afterward. This guide gets you there fast. In about five minutes you'll do your first multi-word search, save your first keyword list, and learn the handful of habits that make the tool pay for itself.

No account is needed for any of this. The free version does everything below.

TL;DR

• Install from your browser's store, then refresh any tabs you already had open.
• Press Ctrl+F (Cmd+F on Mac) on any page to open Highlighty's search bar and start highlighting as you type.
• Add each keyword as its own query in the popup list to highlight several at once, each in its own color.
• Save the words you search often into a list — they'll auto-highlight on every page from then on.
• Use the scrollbar markers and X-Ray panel to jump between matches, including ones hidden in collapsed sections.
• Open a PDF through Highlighty to search it with the exact same workflow — scanned PDFs included.

Step 1 — Install and refresh

Add Highlighty from the Chrome Web Store (it also works in Edge, Brave, Opera, and Arc, and on Firefox 109+). One thing that trips people up: after installing, refresh any web pages you already had open. Extensions only attach to pages loaded after they're installed, so a quick reload on existing tabs gets Highlighty working everywhere.

That's the whole setup. There's no account to create and nothing to configure before you can use it.

Step 2 — Your first search

Open any long page — a news article, a documentation page, a Wikipedia entry — and press Ctrl+F (Cmd+F on Mac). Highlighty's search bar opens. Start typing, and matches light up as you go, with a count so you know how many are on the page. Press Enter to jump to the next match, just like you'd expect.

If you'd rather keep the browser's built-in find for a moment, press Ctrl+F a second time within a beat and the native dialog takes over. You never lose access to either.

Step 3 — Highlight several keywords at once, each in its own color

This is the part the browser's Ctrl+F can't do, and it's the heart of Highlighty. Open the popup and add each keyword as its own query in your list. Every query gets its own color, and they all highlight at the same time on the page. Reading a market report and want "revenue," "churn," and "guidance" to jump out together? Add all three and scan the page in a single pass instead of running three separate searches.

Each query has its own color you can change — pick from the palette or let Highlighty randomize it — so your eye can tell the terms apart. The Cmd+F bar from Step 2 is for quick one-off finds; the query list is for the keywords you want lit up everywhere.

Step 4 — Save a list so it highlights everywhere

Here's the habit that turns Highlighty from a better Ctrl+F into something you rely on. When you find yourself searching the same words across many pages — the requirements in a job description, the defined terms in a contract, your competitors' names, the symptoms in a medical paper — save them as a list.

Once a list is saved and active, those words highlight automatically on every page you open, no retyping. Close the search bar and they stay lit. You can keep as many separate lists as you like — one for a research project, one for job hunting, one for contract review — and switch between them.

Have a long list already sitting in a spreadsheet? You can bulk-import queries straight from an .xlsx file (Excel or Google Sheets), so a hundred terms take one upload instead of a hundred keystrokes.

Step 5 — Move between matches quickly

Two features make a page full of highlights easy to navigate. The scrollbar markers put a tick next to every match along the page's scrollbar, so you can see at a glance where the dense sections are and click to jump to them. The X-Ray minimap is a draggable panel that shows a snippet of text around each match — including matches tucked inside collapsed sections, tabs, and accordions that you'd otherwise have to expand to find.

Together they answer the question "is what I want even on this page, and where?" without endless scrolling.

Step 6 — Use it on PDFs too

Open a PDF through Highlighty's viewer and everything above works the same way: multi-word search, your saved lists, colors, scrollbar markers, X-Ray. If the PDF is a scan — an image with no selectable text — Highlighty's on-device OCR reads it (English, in this release) so you can search it like any other document. The page never leaves your computer to do that.

A few settings worth knowing early

You don't need to touch any of these to get value, but they're the ones people reach for first:

• Filters: turn on case sensitivity, whole-word matching, or diacritic sensitivity from the search bar when a search is too broad.
• Whitelist / blacklist: choose which sites Highlighty runs on, so it stays off pages where you don't want it.
• Colors and font: change highlight colors per term, and bump up the highlighted-text size for readability.
• Backup & restore: export your lists and settings, then import them on another computer to keep your setup in sync.

What to try this week

Pick the one workflow that matches what you do most and build the habit: save the keywords for your current project as a list, then notice how often they're already highlighted before you've searched for anything. That moment — opening a fresh page and seeing the words you care about already lit up — is what Highlighty is really for.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need an account to use Highlighty?

No. Everything in this guide works in the free version with no account. PRO features like fuzzy typo-tolerant search, regex patterns, and cross-tab find sign in with an account, but you can use multi-word search, saved lists, colors, PDF search, and OCR without one.

Why isn't Highlighty working on a page I already had open?

Refresh that tab. Browser extensions only attach to pages loaded after they're installed, so any tabs open before you added Highlighty need a reload before it can highlight them.

How do I highlight more than one word at a time?

Add each keyword as its own query in Highlighty's popup list. Every query gets its own color and they all highlight at once on the page. Save the list and those keywords keep highlighting automatically on every page you open. (The Ctrl+F / Cmd+F bar, by contrast, is for quick one-off finds of a single term.)

Can I load a big list of keywords instead of typing them?

Yes. Highlighty can bulk-import a query list from an .xlsx file (Excel or Google Sheets), so you can load dozens or hundreds of terms in one step.

Does it work on PDFs and scanned documents?

Yes. Open a PDF through Highlighty's viewer and you get the same multi-word search, saved lists, and navigation. Scanned, image-only PDFs are made searchable by on-device OCR (English in this release), and the page never leaves your computer.

Which browsers does Highlighty support?

Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera, and Arc, plus Firefox 109 and newer.