[Beta] Kobo Double Tap Highlight — highlight and remove highlights with a double tap

[julian.doehl]

I made this add-on because the normal highlighting process felt too slow for me. I use my Kobo Libra 2 for learning Japanese and wanted to quickly mark unfamiliar words for later review without interrupting the reading flow.

The plugin lets you highlight a word by double-tapping it. Double-tapping anywhere inside an existing highlight removes the whole highlight, including older highlights and multiword passages.

For Japanese, it uses TinySegmenter to detect word boundaries directly on the Kobo. Japanese long-press selection can also use these boundaries. For English and other languages, it uses Kobo’s built-in word selection.

Optional NickelMenu settings let you toggle Japanese long-press word selection and a fix for incorrectly rendered highlights. Both are enabled by default.
Demo



Compatibility
Tested on a Kobo Libra 2 running firmware 4.38.23852, using KEPUB books in Kobo’s built-in reader. Other models and firmware versions need testing. KEPUB tested; EPUB untested. PDF highlighting is unsupported—double-tapping retains Kobo’s normal zoom behavior.

Download and instructions
GitHub Releases
Source, installation, settings and uninstall instructions

This is beta software that changes saved highlights, so please back up your annotations before testing.

Feedback welcome
I would appreciate compatibility reports, bug reports and suggestions. Please include your Kobo model, firmware version and book format, along with what happened. Reports that everything works are useful too!

I’m particularly interested in:
- Whether adding and removing highlights works reliably.
- Whether ordinary taps and long presses still behave normally.
- Any unexpected full-screen refreshes. (I had to work around those quite a bit)
- Japanese words where the selected boundaries feel wrong.

I developed this with substantial assistance from Codex and tested it on my Libra 2. Code review is welcome too.

Thanks to the developers of NickelHook, NickelMenu and TinySegmenter, whose work made this possible.