Ghostchars: clean hidden characters

Text you copy from a chat window, a PDF, a CMS or a document carries characters you cannot see: zero-width spaces, byte-order marks, soft hyphens, bidi overrides, stray tag characters. They survive a copy and paste, they break search and diffs, and they show up in the middle of your writing without appearing on your screen. Ghostchars finds them and takes them out. Then it tells you exactly what it did, which is the part most tools skip. **Three tiles, every time** - **Removed.** The invisible characters that were doing nothing. - **Kept, load-bearing.** The zero-width joiners holding your family emoji together, the marks Persian, Hindi and Arabic text needs, the tag characters inside a flag. These are reported and deliberately left alone. - **Found, not targeted.** Everything the current settings do not touch, listed with the switch that handles it. Nothing is quietly ignored. Under the tiles, a table: line and column, the character itself, its codepoint, the official Unicode name, the category, and what happened to it. Characters you can see are shown as themselves: an em dash row shows an em dash, and a replacement shows the old character and the new one. Characters that draw nothing get a mark rather than an empty cell. And where the new character is the same shape as the old one (a Cyrillic а that becomes a Latin a, an odd space that becomes an ordinary one), the row marks which is which instead of drawing the same thing twice. Under that sits a second panel you can open, **Prose habits**: sentence-length variation, tell words and phrases, stock sentence openers, dash density and missing specifics, measured on the text you pasted before any cleaning, each one named as a habit with what to change about it. There is no score, no probability and no verdict of any kind. **Three ways to use it** 1. **The popup.** Paste your text and it is cleaned on the spot and copied back to your clipboard; type instead, and the Clean button does the same. Works on any page, needs no permissions at all, and is unlimited forever. 2. **Right-click → "Clean selection with Ghostchars".** Cleans the selection in place when the field is editable, and puts it on your clipboard when it is not. Uses `activeTab`: the right-click itself is the permission, for that one tab. 3. **Clean as you paste.** Opt in from the settings page, one at a time, or everywhere if you prefer. Ghostchars asks Chrome for permission, for that one site or for all sites if you choose the everywhere switch, then cleans the text as it lands and shows a small note saying what it removed. Switching it off hands the permission straight back, and switching "everywhere" off leaves the individual sites you had picked exactly as they were. This is the one metered part: 20 free cleans a week, counted on your own machine, with the count and the reset day always on the settings page. Access is **the sites you choose: one at a time, or everywhere if you prefer**. Either way, nothing is granted at install and everything is revocable from the same page, or from Chrome's own site-access menu. **Advanced, off by default** The default cleanup only removes characters that are invisible and doing no work. Twelve further switches, grouped as Typography, Whitespace, Normalisation, Look-alike letters and Deep cleaning, change text you can see, so they are yours to turn on. Each group says in one line what it does to your text, and each switch explains what it does and why it is off. Two levels, Standard and Maximum, set them all at once. **What this cannot do** - It does not detect, score or estimate whether text was written by an AI, and it makes no claim about what any detector will say afterwards. - It cannot clean inside Google Docs as you paste: Docs draws its editor on a canvas and never fires a paste event an extension can see. The popup and the right-click menu both work there, and the settings page says so plainly. - It does not read your pages, your history or your clipboard in the background. Nothing runs on a site you have not switched on, and if you choose "everywhere", the only thing that runs is the paste cleaner, on paste events, in your browser. **What it costs** The popup and the right-click menu are free and unlimited, forever, on every site. Cleaning as you paste, the part that works while you are not looking, is free for 20 cleans a week, and the settings page always shows the count and the day it resets. A paste with nothing to clean is not a clean and costs nothing. A one-time licence makes it unlimited; the same licence unlocks every Ghostchars app. Nothing is ever taken away when the weekly count runs out: your paste goes in exactly as your browser would have pasted it, uncleaned, and the popup and the right-click menu keep working. **Privacy** No data is collected. No account, no telemetry, no analytics. Your text is processed in your browser and never leaves your device: not a word of it, not a hash of it, not a count of what was in it. The extension makes exactly one network request, and only if you ask for it: if you enter a licence key and press Activate, it sends that key, a random id for this browser, and the word "extension" to ghostchars.com, and receives a signed licence back. That is the whole of it: never in the background, never on a timer, never at install, and never with your text. The weekly count is a number on your own machine and is never transmitted. Full disclosure: https://ghostchars.com/extension/privacy