STRETCH

Less noise. Same signal.

Chrome extension. Compress page prose in place. Keep the site’s design. Expand exact originals on demand.

[click toolbar]  → compress
[select + right click] → Stretch selection
[click text]     → expand original
[Collapse]       → shrink again
[click toolbar]  → restore / cancel

> boot

npm ci
npm run build

1. chrome://extensions → Developer mode → Load unpacked → dist/.
2. Extension options → provider → API key → model → acknowledge page-text processing → Save settings.
3. Open an article. Hit Stretch.

Providers: Anthropic · OpenAI · OpenRouter. Haiku 5.5 is the default for new Anthropic/OpenRouter profiles. Existing choices stay put. Refresh the model list or enter an ID; the model must support structured output.

Anthropic multi-workspace key? Add your wrkspc_… ID from Console → Workspaces.

> trust boundary

• No backend. Page text leaves your browser only after activation, to your selected provider.
• Keys stay in trusted local extension storage—not encrypted, not synced, not exposed to pages.
• API credits required. Test connection is billable; bounded truncation retries can cost extra. No subscription login or silent provider/model switching.
• Original nodes stay local. Model output is text, never executable HTML.
• Summaries can miss nuance. Expand and verify. Don’t send sensitive pages without reviewing your provider’s data policy.

> known edges

Visible prose morphs word by word over roughly 400ms: shared words slide into place while removed/added words fade around nearby anchors. Safe block layouts resize smoothly; selection wrappers remain inline. Original nodes and event handlers are preserved. Reduced motion, offscreen text, complex geometry, long passages (over 180 tokens), and concurrent block updates use immediate swaps. Scrolling, resizing, interacting again, or restoring cancels the visual overlay without undoing the requested state.

Prose only. Code, tables, controls, media, and hidden content are skipped. No Chrome internal pages, PDFs, canvas, or iframe/shadow-root traversal. Dynamic sites may resist modification.

> verify

npm test
npx tsc --noEmit
npx playwright install chromium  # once; or set CHROMIUM_PATH
npm run test:browser
npm run build                   # restore production bundle after browser tests
npm run release                 # production ZIP + SHA-256 in releases/

Demo screenshots and the capture fixture live in store/. Chrome Web Store submission is still pending; API credits and a compatible model are required.

> project

MIT. By soupdiver.

Website source: docs/. npm run site refreshes the shared privacy notice and artwork locally. Planned home: https://soupdiver.github.io/stretch/. Nothing is published automatically.

Tests mock provider APIs. No live inference guarantee. SVG source and PNG icons live in assets/; regenerate with CHROMIUM_PATH=/usr/bin/chromium node scripts/render-icons.mjs or an installed Playwright Chromium.

> kudos

Inspired by cc-stretch by pro-vi, which brings Ted Nelson’s stretchtext idea to Claude Code. Stretch takes that reading idea to the browser.