bookmarks.txt

bookmarks.txt is a concept of keeping bookmarks in plain text files.

Principals

• Bookmarked URLs are stored in files named bookmarks.txt. The format is described below.
• A “global” bookmarks file is located in the home directory ($HOME/bookmarks.txt).
• “Local” bookmarks files could exist in different directories as well.

Format

URLs are stored one per line and could be accompanied with optional titles. Titles are separated from URLs with one space character.

Examples:

• a URL without any title

  https://www.example.com
  -----------------------
  ^
  URL
  

• a URL with a title

  https://sul.im personal website
  -------------- ----------------
  ^              ^
  URL            Optional title
  

Tools

The plain text nature of bookmark files allows to use any program to manage URLs. The bin/ directory of this repository contains bookmarks script that could be used to list existing and add new URLs. However nothing should stop you from building your own tools.

Usage

Use fzf to select a URL and open it in the default browser:

./bin/bookmarks | fzf | cut -d ' ' -f 1 | xargs open

Add a new URL:

./bin/bookmarks https://github.com/soulim/bookmarks.txt

This is how I use bookmarks.txt:

• $HOME/bookmarks.txt contains URLs useful in any context. These are “global” addresses.
• Each project directory has “local” bookmarks.txt files with URLs pointing to tools specific to each project (repositories, monitoring tools, dashboards, and so on).
• A symbolic link $HOME/bin/bookmarks point to bin/bookmarks from this directory.
• With help of fzf I have a nice menu with fuzzy search to select URLs and open them automatically.

Contributing

bookmarks.txt is open to code contributions for bug fixes only. As features might carry a long-term maintenance burden, they will not be accepted at this time. Please submit an issue if you have a feature you would like to request.

License

See LICENSE for license text.