2026-07-04

Capcat + md2rich 2026: CLI Web Archiver to Rich Text Pipeline

A new open-source tool called Capcat (capcat.org) entered the Markdown ecosystem in mid-2026. It is a CLI/TUI article archiver that fetches a web page and outputs clean Markdown — no browser, no GUI, no account. For anyone who already uses md2rich to convert Markdown to rich text for social and publishing platforms, Capcat closes a gap: getting content into your Markdown pipeline from the open web.

Why CLI Archiving Matters in 2026

Most web archiving tools fall into one of two camps: browser extensions (SingleFile, ArchiveBox, MarkDownload) that require you to be in a browser, or hosted services (Pocket, Notion Web Clipper, outline.com) that upload your content to a third party. Both have drawbacks:

• Browser extensions depend on manual interaction — you must open the page, click the extension, and deal with each URL one at a time. Batch processing requires extra tooling.
• Hosted clippers upload your content to a server you do not control. For work-in-progress drafts, internal documentation, or unpublished source material, this is a privacy leak.
• Both produce HTML — which you then have to convert back to Markdown if you want to edit or repurpose the text in a Markdown-first writing workflow.

Capcat solves all three: it is a single CLI binary, runs locally, and outputs Markdown directly. That means you can curl some-api-docs.io/page and pipe the result into your writing pipeline without ever opening a browser tab.

Installing Capcat

Installation is straightforward on any Unix-like system:

# macOS via Homebrew
brew install capcat

# Linux — download binary
curl -LO https://capcat.org/releases/capcat-linux-x86_64.tar.gz
tar xzf capcat-linux-x86_64.tar.gz
sudo mv capcat /usr/local/bin/

# Or build from source (Rust)
cargo install capcat

After installation, verify with capcat --version. The project documents Linux, macOS, and Windows — this guide covers macOS and Linux.

Step 1: Archive a Web Page as Markdown

Basic usage is a single command:

capcat https://example.com/blog-posts/2026/editor-roundup > archive/editor-roundup.md

This fetches the article, extracts the main content using readability heuristics, and writes clean Markdown to archive/editor-roundup.md. The output includes:

• The article title as an H1
• All headings (H2, H3) preserved
• Paragraph text, inline formatting (bold, italic, links), lists, and blockquotes
• Code blocks fenced with triple backticks
• Image links (the URL, not the inline image)
• A source and date header in YAML frontmatter

To see what Markdown it produces for a specific page, pipe to stdout first: capcat https://example.com/article | head -50.

Step 2: Edit and Remix the Markdown

Once you have the Markdown file locally, open it in your editor. This is where the real writing happens — Capcat gives you the source material, but your voice and commentary are what turns an archive into content:

1. Trim the extract — Capcat is conservative and keeps more content than you need. Delete boilerplate, remove sections irrelevant to your angle.
2. Add your own sections — your analysis, your examples, your screenshots table. The archive is raw material, not a final draft.
3. Reword and restructure — Capcat preserves the original paragraph flow; you may want to reorder points for your audience.
4. Add internal links — link to your own previous articles, your product, or related resources.

After editing, save a clean Markdown file ready for the conversion step.

# Editor Roundup 2026: Top Tools Compared

Capcat archived a comparison article from a tech blog.
I trimmed the intro, kept the comparison table data,
added my own take on each editor, and linked back to
my previous roundup post.

## Obsidian — the productivity powerhouse
Capcat extracted Obsidian's feature list from the source.
I added my own note about its plugin ecosystem ...

## VS Code — the dark horse
The archive preserved VS Code's Markdown extension list.
I reorganized it by category for readability ...

Step 3: Convert to Rich Text with md2rich

Now that you have a clean, edited Markdown file, open it and copy the content to your clipboard. Head to md2rich.com — the editor is a single-page app with no install, no signup, and no upload:

1. Paste the Markdown into the left panel of md2rich
2. Select your target platform — LinkedIn, X Articles, Medium, Notion, Substack, or Bluesky long-form. md2rich adjusts the output to what each platform's editor accepts (headings flatten to bold on LinkedIn, code blocks format as monospace on Medium, tables reflow on Notion, etc.)
3. Click "Convert" or "Copy" — the rich-text version goes to your clipboard
4. Paste into the target editor — formatting intact

Because md2rich runs entirely in your browser (no network request for the conversion), your draft and the archived source material never touch a server. The full pipeline — Capcat on the terminal, editing locally, md2rich in the browser — stays 100% offline-capable.

Power Use Cases

Beyond the basic workflow, the Capcat + md2rich combination unlocks several power-use patterns for content creators:

Batch Research — Topic Clusters

When researching a topic cluster (e.g. "best Markdown editors 2026"), archive 6-8 comparison articles in one session:

for url in $(cat editor-comparison-urls.txt); do
  capcat "$url" > "research/$(echo $url | md5 | head -c 8).md"
done

Archive all sources in parallel, then open each Markdown file, extract the comparison data, and write your own synthesis article. Convert the final draft with md2rich and publish.

Competitor Monitoring — Weekly Brief

Run a weekly cron script that archives your competitors' blog posts and documentation updates, produces a Markdown summary, and converts it to a LinkedIn newsletter-style post via md2rich. Your research pipeline becomes your content pipeline.

Documentation Repackaging

Archive API docs, changelogs, or release notes from upstream projects. Edit them into a tutorial format tailored to your audience. Convert with md2rich and cross-post to your preferred platforms.

How Capcat Compares to Other Web-to-Markdown Tools

There are several ways to get web content into Markdown. Here is how Capcat stacks up against the alternatives:

Capcat's differentiator is the focused scope: it extracts articles to Markdown with no configuration, no browser dependency, and the output is designed to be piped directly into a writing workflow. Pandoc can also fetch URLs but requires more setup for readability extraction (you need a custom Lua filter or an external readability wrapper).

FAQ

Verdict

Capcat fills a real gap in the Markdown creator workflow. Before Capcat, getting web content into Markdown required browser extensions (per-page, manual) or hosted services (privacy leak). With Capcat, the terminal handles the capture step and your Markdown editor handles the writing step. The output goes through md2rich for platform-specific rich-text conversion.

The result is a clean, privacy-respecting, end-to-end pipeline: web page → Capcat → Markdown → edit → md2rich → rich text → publish. For anyone who treats Markdown as their primary writing format and wants to publish to multiple platforms without uploading drafts to an intermediary, this is the setup worth building.