9 ms·

Bookmarks.txt is a concept of keeping URLs in plain text files

195 points by secwang 1y ago

rickcarlino 1y ago
Reminds me of GemText somewhat. https://geminiprotocol.net/docs/gemtext.gmi https://geminiprotocol.net/docs/gemtext.gmi
daft_pink 1y ago
can we just use markdown and sync with obsidian?
- rendall 1y ago
  No! You cannot.
- anticodon 1y ago
  I use buku: https://github.com/jarun/buku https://github.com/jarun/buku And Syncthing to sync with all my devices.
redkoala 1y ago
I’m using a similar format to keep my links organized on an iPhone. A bookmarks.txt note kept in Apple Notes with markdown # headings to separate each category, allowing me to not keep open 500 tabs on Safari.
- dcrazy 1y ago
  Why not just use actual bookmarks in Safari?
- panzerboiler 1y ago
  Let me check... 1331 open tabs in Safari on my iPad. Several text files with thousands of bookmarks, with various attempts at grouping. Since I cannot save myself, I save them.
KingOfCoders 1y ago
Need to take a look. For my CTO newsletter I use raindrop.io to store interesting articles I encounter, export them to CSV (like bookmarks.txt), sort, filter and remove 90%, convert them to my own format, write my content and convert them to Markdown and then to HTML with Hugo.
alexmonami 1y ago
I needed to keep the highlighted text as well. With ChatGPT I have created an extension [1] that lets me capture highlights from any webpage and send them directly to a Notion database along with the page URL, capture date, and a per-selected project tag. [1]https://github.com/sea2ocean/keeper https://github.com/sea2ocean/keeper
selcuka 1y ago
Mozilla-based browsers used to (before Firefox 3, I believe) store bookmarks as HTML (bookmarks.html) instead of using an SQLite database. It still uses a single HTML file when exporting or importing bookmarks.
- dcrazy 1y ago
  I was wondering if someone else would remember this.
  - dariosalvi78 1y ago
    I do! And still thought it was the case! In fact the first reaction to this txt thing was: well, we already have them in html, why txt?
  - johnisgood 1y ago
    Remember? I just exported bookmarks as a HTML a few days ago. :o
    - dcrazy 1y ago
      I was referring to the time when Bookmarks.html was Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox’s actual on-disk storage format, not just its import/export format. Editing that file would change the contents of your Bookmarks menu.
  - selcuka 1y ago
    I also remember that the first web based forums used a Perl script that actually created new HTML files on the web server when someone posted a new topic, and modified the existing one when someone posted a reply. A bit similar to static web site generators today, only with endless security vulnerabilities.
    - krapp 1y ago
      You might be referring to the venerable wwwboard from Matt's Script Archive, which amazingly still exists: https://www.scriptarchive.com/wwwboard.html https://www.scriptarchive.com/wwwboard.html
crossroadsguy 1y ago
Bookmarks are something I have grown tired of. From the days of del.icio.us, I started collecting bookmarks and it kind of trickled along almost until Pinboard went on life support (or something else if you'd prefer to call that). The thing is - I just saved bookmarks, I never really utilised them ever, to find something, to go back to. I can remember once or twice and either I couldn't find anything among my bookmarks or the sites were long gone. I really don't think I personally had to consult my thousands of bookmarks (which I have now dutifully migrated to Raindrop of course, because why the hell not) in any useful sense ever. I paid for a couple of archiving services as well before realising "nah, I don't really need that, nor this recurring outgoing payment in my life". So like a lot of things on the Internet, I guess I did "bookmarking things" just for the sake of doing "bookmarking things". That reminds me of note-taking. There was a time when I used to do "note-taking exploration and research" and never really took any notes or, hell, even needed them. When I started note-taking, while I still keep an eye out for a decent app, I just pick a decent or half-decent note-taking app and I just take notes. Oh, backup and sync tools and services. Those too - there was "explore and research" and now there's "just use something damnit". "TODOing" to, yes! I am sure this tool (or philosophy? style? bookmarking architecture?) is very nice and novel. This is not at all reflecting on why or why not one should do such "things", I absolutely believe this is good and sometimes in fact results in tools/services massively good, I am just talking about this out loud wondering whether it's just me or this kind of fatigue really sets in for other people as well.
- enos_feedler 1y ago
  I spend most of my days wading through the web. When i come across something that excites me I share the link to apple Notes. I dont write anything. Its just a bookmark. In February I spent a week sorting 5000 links into folders. It was quite satisfying to guess why i saved things, find patterns, create an organizational structure etc. the activity yielded both motivation and direction for my personal projects.
- II2II 1y ago
  For some people, they have no need for bookmarks. For other people, bookmarks may be useful but the implementation is not. Reading the author's description made me realize how unbookmark-like bookmarks actually are. The current implementations are somewhat akin to creating a list of books that you like at the library. It's not so much a pointer to the information you found useful, as it is a list of books you found useful. You still have to do some digging when you go back for the book. If the book is lost, you end up having a reference to something that you cannot obtain. And if you just add books to the end of your list, you still end up having to search through the list. The only way around that is to spend time organizing your list. It's no wonder why bookmarks are useless to so many people. The author doesn't really solve the problem with bookmarks, except for one. The last one. By sticking a bookmarks file in a project directory, at least you're only searching through a list of bookmarks relevant to the project. If you are no longer interested in the project and delete it, you're also getting rid of bookmarks that you (hopefully) no longer need. It also addresses the portability of bookmarks. As far as I can tell, the only way to move bookmarks between any of the major browsers involves the use of special software or network services. Look at moving bookmarks from one Firefox installation to another: you either use online sync, export to HTML to import from HTML, or import the database (which replaces your current bookmarks with the ones being imported).
andymurd 1y ago
Isn't that how del.icio.us started all this bookmarking in the first place?
politelemon 1y ago
Given that the aim is to still visit the URL, this appears to be browser bookmarks with extra steps. I am not seeing an advantage to the external storage mechanism and the overhead it brings. Browsers have been doing an excellent job of managing bookmarks, you can tag and search for them from the address bar itself which is very convenient.
- Wololooo 1y ago
  Well, actually I could see a use for this in specific context and use cases, for instance if you happen to have different dev environments you're able to just move from machine to machine while keeping all the bookmarks in the repository. If you organise them you can even reference them from the codebase, or the documentation to avoid clutter. The format is simple and dumb enough so that a simple bookmark.txt can be converted into a dictionary, array that can be used in the program if some URLs are supposed to be used there. It's not revolutionary by any means, but I have to confess that it didn't occur to me that's a great per repo documentation reference tool or per folder.
  - adastra22 1y ago
    You don’t have bookmark sync in your browser?
    - teiferer 1y ago
      Is there a reliable standard to do this across browser vendors and versions and not have to rely on a proprietary cloud implementation on somebody's server?
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      - adithyassekhar 1y ago
        I think bookmarks.html is pretty standard.
pmlnr 1y ago
Don't. Link rot is harsh. Something like wallabag saved so much content for me that is otherwise now lost.
- bmacho 1y ago
  Ctrl+s > ctrl+d. No link rot + it's available without internet.
  - account42 1y ago
    Ideally, Ctrl+D would do both so you have a backup but also can check the current state for content that receives updates.
- 3036e4 1y ago
  Scrapbook was (is?) great, since it does everything bookmarks do plus saves a copy of the page just the way it currently looks and makes that available in the browser. I switched to saving pages using SinglePage instead, that saves the current page as a single stand-alone HTML file. It loses the bookmark-like features, but I can sort those saved files easier in my file system to keep them like any other downloaded documents on various topics. Each file also by default has a comment near the top with its original URL, so it would be easy to write a script to find all of those and build something like bookmarks.html.
Brajeshwar 1y ago
I do this, albeit, kinda a Start Page. I like it because it is plain-text, and I can access it from any browser (not just the ones I bookmarked with). Mine is online (rendered client-side) so I can access it from anywhere. https://start.oinam.com https://start.oinam.com Just in case, anyone wants to look the source is at https://github.com/oinam/start https://github.com/oinam/start
- bhaney 1y ago
  Thank you for that "Void" tool. Very pleasant.
- heyyfurqan 1y ago
  thanks for the tool, gonna build a similar one for myself :)
- wener 1y ago
  I just track my bookmark as Awesome https://wener.me/notes/tags/awesome https://wener.me/notes/tags/awesome The source is at https://github.com/wenerme/wener https://github.com/wenerme/wener I found it's very useful, especially the license and basic tech stack & description. One day I will grab the meta and display along with the link.
- shreyaha 1y ago
  i tried Void for a moment to meditate. great stuff!
sdovan1 1y ago
I never really used browser bookmarks until I discovered Firefox's bookmark keyword feature [1]. It basically eliminates the search step. For example, I set "pr" to the GitHub pull request page. Just press Alt + D to focus the address bar, type the keyword, and hit Enter. [1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/bookmarks-firefox#w_how-to-use-keywords-with-bookmarks https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/bookmarks-firefox#w_how...
- 3036e4 1y ago
  I configured Firefox to only ever auto-complete to bookmarks or open tabs, never some random thing from my browser history. That also makes it very easy to find specific pages and I do not have to memorize any tags.
- Pooge 1y ago
  I don't know why nobody uses that feature. I have quite a few. For example, Wikipedia (w), Wiktionary (wt), Go docs (go), ... Saves me a middleman request.
  - fransje26 1y ago
    > Saves me a middleman request. Saving the earth one request (less) at a time!
AbuAssar 1y ago
I have become somewhat disillusioned with maintaining a list of bookmarks, as I often discover that the URLs are no longer functional when revisiting pages that have been bookmarked for an extended period.
- teiferer 1y ago
  Use archive.org for permalinks?
  - kragen 1y ago
    Archive.org is always at risk of being shut down.
kragen 1y ago
I've been doing exactly this for ten years, keeping the bookmarks file in Git. I added 70 bookmarks today, which is more than average. But rather than just a "title" I have whatever seems like I might want to search for later, including if the link rots. So it's more of a summmary. With hashtags. In Markdown (though without newlines). Each new day gets a header. Here's Sunday, with blank lines added to get reasonable formatting on HN: links from 02025-08-24: https://archive.org/details/TheDesignOfSwitchingCircuits/page/n227/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/TheDesignOfSwitchingCircuits/pag... My childhood book on digital logic (including a little #electronics) as an #ebook. #hardware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-intensity_discharge_lamp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-intensity_discharge_lamp sodium-arc and mercury-arc lamps are also HID lamps. #hardware https://archive.org/details/ge-glow-lamp-manual-1966/page/n1/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/ge-glow-lamp-manual-1966/page/n1... scan of GE’s glow-lamp manual for neon lamps from 01966. #ebook #hardware #electronics #history https://youtu.be/Nn5v59l2Xec?t=64 https://youtu.be/Nn5v59l2Xec?t=64 VEMAG brand double-screw extruder screw pump #mechanisms pumping M&Ms and ground meat. #video footage of the parts being washed. https://www.radiomuseum.org/r/aleksandro_arz_51_arz51.html https://www.radiomuseum.org/r/aleksandro_arz_51_arz51.html very pretty old radio https://www.nature.com/articles/nmat2141 https://www.nature.com/articles/nmat2141 "Superlenses" to overcome the diffraction limit, #optics #paper from 02008 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_length#Electrical_lengthening_and_shortening https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_length#Electrical_l... electrically long and short #antennas and loading coils and whatnot. #electronics #communications #radio https://www.ornl.gov/publication/evaluation-power-fluidic-pumping-technology-molten-salt-reactor-applications https://www.ornl.gov/publication/evaluation-power-fluidic-pu... #fluidics for pumping in #molten-salt #nuclear-reactors (just an abstract) https://www.hopefulmons.com/p/in-defense-of-tech-trees https://www.hopefulmons.com/p/in-defense-of-tech-trees trying to use "tech trees" to understand the #history of technological development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresnel_diffraction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresnel_diffraction near-field #diffraction is "Fresnel diffraction" #optics https://psi329.cankaya.edu.tr/uploads/files/Lewis-PernFascistInquiry-1980.pdf https://psi329.cankaya.edu.tr/uploads/files/Lewis-PernFascis... Was #Perón a fascist? #fascism #history #PDF #paper #toread https://lwn.net/Articles/1030818/ https://lwn.net/Articles/1030818/ #Treacherous-Computing for “confidential VMs” #privacy despite #Linux #virtualization #toread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44950482 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44950482 discussion of alternative ways to run graphical apps inside #Docker, including maybe drawing in a web browser https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44991638 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44991638 my post about how #Rust’s approach to handling #Unicode introduces unnecessary bugs into command-line programs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WApL1EL2GMk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WApL1EL2GMk #Frondizi speaks about #Perón. #history #Argentina #video https://github.com/3b1b/manim https://github.com/3b1b/manim Manim math #animation software for morphing equations and plots and stuff into each other, using FFmpeg, OpenGL, LaTeX, and Pango https://nvmexpress.org/wp-content/uploads/September-2020_NVMe-Zoned-Namespace-SSDs-The-Zoned-Storage-Linux-Software-Ecosystem.pdf https://nvmexpress.org/wp-content/uploads/September-2020_NVM... in ZNS #zoned-storage a zone must be a power-of-2 number of LBAs, unlike in ZAC and ZBC #PDF #toread https://docs.kernel.org/filesystems/f2fs.html https://docs.kernel.org/filesystems/f2fs.html "f2fs" is the #Flash friendly #filesystem for #zoned-storage. “F2FS is a file system exploiting NAND flash memory-based storage devices, which is based on Log-structured File System (#LFS). The design has been focused on addressing the fundamental issues in LFS, which are snowball effect of wandering tree and high cleaning overhead.” ———⁂——— Here's today, ten years ago, so you can see how my bookmarking style has developed: links from 2015-08-28: http://www.excamera.com/sphinx/article-j1a-swapforth.html http://www.excamera.com/sphinx/article-j1a-swapforth.html A free-software #Forth operating system running on the J1a open-source CPU running on a Lattice #FPGA thanks to Project #IceStorm’s reverse engineering and the resulting free-software #synthesis and programming toolchain, running on the Lattice iCEstick evaluation board with 8K of RAM. #J1 #hardware https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRVaLUQUmA8&list=PLACB124F79F677B6A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRVaLUQUmA8&list=PLACB124F79... A 2009 #video lecture series on #mecheng manufacturing processes by “nptelhrd”, Prof. Inderdeep Singh at IIT Roorkee. Some problems with the audio, seems to be a bit clipped. However, the video is entirely a talking head and a bunch of PowerPoint slides, so the only way you would watch this video to learn about powder metallurgy instead of reading a book is if you are dyslexic or have a beard fetish. At least it doesn’t have shitty elevator music. http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/ http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/ The USGS gives #pricing information on a variety of mineral #materials, including some historical stuff. #minerals http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/titanium/mcs-2015-titan.pdf http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/titanium/mc... #Titanium #pricing in the US has gone from US$9.62/kg in 2010 to US$11.20/kg in 2014. Nearby pages use dollars per pound, but the prices per kg show a sharp reduction from its peak of US$17.28 in 2005, but it had a low of US$6.50 in 2003, US$9.70 in 1995, and US$8.26 in 1992–3. This means that the FFC Cambridge Process is not in production yet. http://pubs.usgs.gov/sir/2012/5188/ http://pubs.usgs.gov/sir/2012/5188/ A #PDF with a bunch of metal #materials #pricing for 1970–2010. Comprehensive, covers nearly all metals and some semimetals. Unfortunately at least some prices use folk units like pounds instead of SI. http://rebeccasolnit.net/essay/a-rape-a-minute-a-thousand-corpses-a-year/ http://rebeccasolnit.net/essay/a-rape-a-minute-a-thousand-co... Rebecca Solnit talks a bit about #rape and #intimate-partner-violence. #feminism https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2015/08/06/2015-18402/equipment-authorization-and-electronic-labeling-for-wireless-devices https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2015/08/06/2015-184... The FCC is proposing to outlaw #free-software for wireless firmware. https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/4732/emulate-an-intel-8086-cpu https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/4732/emulate-an... Programmers competing to do Intel 8086 (subset) #emulation in different languages, including a C program in 348 lines. ———⁂——— Perhaps surprisingly, of those 8 links from ten years ago, only one has really linkrotted; unsurprisingly it's Solnit's essay. But it survives in the Archive. The titanum PDF redirects to the general titanium Mineral Commodities Summary page. Emacs full-text search is surprisingly often effective at finding relevant information. Grep (or M-x occur, its moral equivalent) works even more often. F6 opens the URL in my browser. Emacs C-s can search those 12000 bookmarks faster than I can type. At some point in the past I wrote a Chrome extension that would show me all the links for a given hashtag with their descriptions (formatted as Markdown), with the hashtags being links to other similar hashtag pages, and also let me bookmark pages from within the browser interface, but I don't know where it is now. It wouldn't work with Manifest v3 anyway.
glxxyz 1y ago
I bookmark pages in Chrome just so autocomplete will find them. I almost never look back at the actual bookmarks any more.
lkuty 1y ago
I think that is a good idea to keep URLs as text. I use the Tab Session Manager extension which allows me to export saved sessions (title, URL, with a little bit of extra stuff) as text (json actually, a little bit too verbose) and I also use Eagle Filer to save entire web pages, just in case it disappears from the web, which happens quite regularly. What I want is the title of the web page associated with its URL and maybe extra keywords. I don't use classic browser bookmarks much anymore.
jibal 1y ago
I use emacs org mode files ... much more functional.
- nairadithya 1y ago
  Could you go over how you save bookmarks with Emacs, I'm curious as a fellow Emacs user.
  - jibal 1y ago
    I have a key combo bound to https://github.com/rexim/org-cliplink https://github.com/rexim/org-cliplink
  - tconfrey 1y ago
    Take a look at BrainTool. It's a bookmarks/tabs/todo-manager browser extension that writes to an org-mode syntax text file. Allows you to capture notes, containment hierarchy, to-do state etc and expose it all to your org PKMS. (Disclosure, I'm the developer.) https://braintool.org https://braintool.org https://github.com/tconfrey/BrainTool https://github.com/tconfrey/BrainTool
    - jibal 1y ago
      Does it work in Edge?
mlcq 1y ago
I like plain text; it looks clean and tidy. I think I'll give this a try.
rajnathani 1y ago
This is needed, TIL but only till recently did Firefox remove their bookmarks limit, it was something like 6000 about 3 years ago. (For those curious about why one needs so many bookmarks, similar to maybe some other people, I use the bookmark feature as a "like" to save articles/URLs I find interesting).
- johnisgood 1y ago
  Same, I have many folders with subfolders of related stuff, and on top, I have "sessions" as well, and lots of notes (Vivaldi).
yegle 1y ago
My way of managing bookmarks is to just print the page as a PDF, save PDF in a Google Drive folder. Then you can do full text search quickly.
- aa-jv 1y ago
  Same, been doing this since the start of the web. I have decades of web pages I've found interesting over the years, and its all offline/local searchable and will be there for me when the grid goes down. I'm part-way through getting the 90,000+ PDF files collected in this manner, analyzed by an LLM so I can .. query it about my own interests, I guess? ;) I don't find that saving URL's is very productive - they are the dangling pointer of the web. Far better to have your own cache of docs to refer to imho ..
- chongli 1y ago
  I mostly bookmark sites, not pages, so this wouldn’t capture the information I want.
Muvasa 1y ago
I actually do this. I put urls and files in a text file. Which I parse with rofi. The reason why I do this is so I can just open rofi with a shortcut and type out the name of the file or url and instantly open it.
renegat0x0 1y ago
I think that people who say they prefer keeping a simple file has never found a good app for bookmarking. There is still a space for killer app with bookmarks. I think that simple URL bookmarking is just wrong. It simply will not work for big bookmarking data sets. The key is using tags, and rating system, and automatic update which checks if URLs are even valid any more. I also thought that we miss a killer RSS app. That is why I created my own self-hosted app. - it can store bookmarks - it gather news through RSS - it provides tags (I can search bookmarks by tags) - it provides user ratings (I can filter using it too) - I can filter, or order by link, date of publish, date of creation, etc. etc. - It checks if links are rotten (and marks them) - I can mark link to read it for later - I can see how many times I have visited a link - I can check 'related links' to jump to things I have jump before from this link On the other hand, I am quite certain that I use it, because it is 'tailored for me'. I am not that interested in the looks. I know how it works - https://rumca-js.github.io/search https://rumca-js.github.io/search - demo search - https://rumca-js.github.io/music https://rumca-js.github.io/music - demo music - https://rumca-js.github.io/bookmarks https://rumca-js.github.io/bookmarks - demo bookmarks - https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database - database of bookmarks - https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database - link meta information - https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive - main crawling engine using for all databases
pacifika 1y ago
Just in case, If you want to index the content of these bookmarks for searching maybe my little wip tool face is useful to you. As it’s also a local server you can use a keyword search in browsers for it. https://github.com/svandragt/fafi https://github.com/svandragt/fafi
darekkay 1y ago
I've been maintaining my bookmarks as plain text (YAML) for years, which I then turn into a single interactive HTML file [1]. [1] https://darekkay.com/static-marks/ https://darekkay.com/static-marks/
Ciantic 1y ago
I have my own Chrome/Firefox extension that shows bookmarks in the new tab page ordered by recency with a search field on top, it's pretty good for me. Every time I open a new tab, I see the latest bookmarks I've added. Granted, I don't usually bother to browse older ones, but at least I see ~15 new ones on (desktop monitor) every day. Also, I sometimes add a snippet of text from the content to the title of the bookmark, making it easier to search afterwards.
dkdcio 1y ago
I’ve been doing something similar for years, more recently published at https://github.com/lostmygithubaccount/dkdc-links https://github.com/lostmygithubaccount/dkdc-links reading through this thread I’m seeing people use bookmarks to save dozens of new URLs per day, which is very surprising to me
nerd-unsecured 1y ago
(Probably skip if you don't want to read a ~rant..) Questions: - New "format"? It is a CSV with spaces as separators and no header? Why? - Global file located in the home directory? Why would you want another file to pollute the $HOME? Why not just $BOOKMARKS_FILE or something? - Local bookmarks file - why don't just reuse README.md? Add 'Resources' section and chuck markdown links in it, parsing that is not (much) harder, and you get nothing more with a separate 'bookmarks.txt' file. As some other comments pointed out, there are no tags, no (semantic) grouping, no content archiving, etc... This is just a list of URL with optional title attached to them, this is not a distinct 'concept'...
- gradientsrneat 1y ago
  The format itself is not as useful as the unix-like shell oneliners one crafts around it. The inflexible simplicity is therefore the point. (and also it's easy to modify manually)
est 1y ago
what problem does this solve? For frequent websites I can remember their TLD and navigate to the panel I wanted For content saving a URL is not enough. Gotta save the full page or it might be gone very soon.
__dennis__ 1y ago
I've made my own private bookmark browser extension that syncs e2ee across my devices. Because it's an extension I can open bookmarks automatically in a private tab and much more. After some years of using this extension every day I decided to make it available for others as well. You can find it here, free forever: markbook.io This was just a side project I did in about 6 months of my spare time, definitely not a polished product that's trying to become the next billion dollar enterprise.
account42 1y ago
I think this is going in the wrong direction. While cool URIs don't change [0], many URLs that you'd like to bookmark are not cool. So for bookmarks to be useful long-term you need to store much more data than just the URL. At the very least you need a timestamp to be able to find the resource you wanted to bookmark on the Internet Archive in the future. But better would be to save a snapshot of the site alongside the bookmark instead. It's a shame that no browser cares to integrate that or other relatively simple usability enhancements instead of blindly copying Chrome's UI (which usually means removing features). [0] https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI
- j45 1y ago
  I agree, annotating bookmarks is quite valuable, including highlights, which could also be stored in text. Logseq, etc, are tools that help facilitate this, albeit in not plain text format, but close.
- imiric 1y ago
  I don't think this project is necessarily going in the wrong direction, but I agree that keeping track of web URLs requires more data than just the URL and title. At the very least, I personally need tags. Tree hierarchies are too limiting, but tags allow adding free-form metadata which can be used to quickly find anything. I often don't remember the actual URL or title of a web site, but I'm looking for a general category, and with tags I'm usually able to find what I'm looking for. This does require a certain level of discipline from the user to use tags consistently, but they work well IME. These days with ML tools it's easier than ever to assign relevant tags to URLs automatically, though I would personally not rely on them because of their propensity to hallucinate and not follow conventions. And, like you say, web sites change and disappear constantly, so snapshots are important as well. I've been meaning to try SingleFile/ArchiveBox/Wallabag for months now, but I'm currently too comfortable with Pinboard. Pinboard has been working great for me for many years, contrary to the negative buzz around it, but I don't have confidence that it will stick around forever. I just hope that I can export and migrate all my snapshot data as well...
- NoboruWataya 1y ago
j45 1y ago
Feels strange to wonder how far things have abstracted that text files feel like a concept.
smusamashah 1y ago
I have been keeping lists of urls in https://gist.github.com https://gist.github.com as markdown files. Someone even made a shortcut http://gist.new/ http://gist.new/ It has been very useful. URLs are super easy to modify, super easy to share, super easy to open, add notes etc. Having a gist adds the ability to share a set or URLs and people can comment on them. I could (if i want to) use github API and a browser extension to put bookmarks directly in a gist as plaintext
teo_zero 1y ago
Reading through the comments in this thread, it looks like the population is split in two groups. The first group considers "bookmarks" as a directory of often-visited sites, and needs a way to avoid typing their URLs every time. The second group intends "bookmarks" as a wish list for sites that might need a second (deeper) visit. It may be time to find another metaphor for this second group: "postcards" might work better than "bookmarks".
- deafpolygon 1y ago
  the second group is why read-it-later services exist.
iamcalledrob 1y ago
The underappreciated .url file / [InternetShortcut] format seems like a much better fit for this: 1. 20+ years of OS support for double-click to open 2. It already supports an embedded title. 3. It's basically just INI/TOML, so you can add custom fields that get ignored by parsers. Want to embed a screenshot? Just append Screenshot=B64(data). Want to add tags? Same deal. You can also organise them as files in...folders.
- eadmund 1y ago
  > It's basically just INI/TOML That’s a dealbreaker for me. I like something that I can use grep and other Unix utilities on. There’s a reason that the tabular style formats of /etc/passwd, crontab and inetd exist. > You can also organise them as files in...folders. +1 on this concept, though. For some reason folks forget that the filesystem is a pretty decent hierarchical database!
  - iamcalledrob 1y ago
    It's really just Key=Value, with [InternetShortcut] as the first line. Should be pretty easy to grep through. It's an absolutely minimal format
  - z3ratul163071 1y ago
    I have tool creating html files like this: <html><head><meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; URL='https://www.someurl.com https://www.someurl.com' " /></head><body></body></html> upon opening these htmls , the browser just redirects to the actual url.
- Lammy 1y ago
  FreeDesktop-dot-org also has a Desktop Entry spec with a `URL=` key and is what you get if you drag an address bar favicon to a folder on a Lunix desktop: https://specifications.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/latest/recognized-keys.html#key-url https://specifications.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/la...
habibur 1y ago
Did the same, with the following differences : - tab separator instead of space. you don't need cut -d with tabs. tab is the default separator for cut. - use xsel -b to capture clipboard data while adding. Copy the URL into from browser to clipboard. And then run on console $ url.add hn bookmark script # all parameters are keyword tags. The script fetches the URL from clipboard $(xsel -b)
Shorel 1y ago
I am using a private instance of Wallabag, it stores the "bookmarks", the metadata, optional tags, and saves a copy of the content that gets synced to my e-reader.
chongli 1y ago
Does anyone have a solution for full-text search of a folder of bookmarks? Specifically I want to search the sites themselves, not merely the text of the home pages (which is where the URLs point). The specific problem I’m trying to solve is searching for seeds. I have about 20 different seed vendors bookmarked I want to search across all of their seed catalogues at once (without having to visit each site to search one at a time). More broadly though I would love the ability to do custom / curated search. A search engine designed for searching collections of sites instead of the entire internet would be ideal.
- cluckindan 1y ago
  Crawl the pages, optionally convert HTML to Markdown, and insert them into a search index, such as OpenSearch/Elasticsearch. Vibe code a script to make queries with filtering etc.
- conception 1y ago
  Firecrawl might be a tool for you
jim_lawless 1y ago
I have a handful of sites that I visit frequently. I wrote a script called "to" that has an embedded list of these sites' URL's along with some metadata that includes the preferred browser client and a short mnemonic name for the site. When I issue a command like: to hn The script will open the site https://news.ycombinator.com https://news.ycombinator.com with Chrome. I also have a help screen that lists the URL's and their mnemonics. Again, note that this is a very short list. I like working at a command-line so it's often faster for me to run something like this instead of typing the first few characters of a site name into a browser and waiting for the URL autocomplete to finish the URL for me.
yahoozoo 1y ago
I wish I could easily export my iPhone’s Safari “Reading List” even to something like this. I found a Shortcuts script that would do it but there are so many links I have saved that it freezes.
- danhite 1y ago
  > there are so many links I have saved that it freezes If you are motivated enough to write Apple Shortcuts a useful trick for ~Find type actions that overload is to Filter them into reassemblable pieces eg action find items from reading list filter Title begins with A (then do B etc) that this trick often works would be due to the internal nature of the Shortcuts implementation problems, so YMMV
  - yahoozoo 1y ago
    I’ll give it a try, thanks
rafram 1y ago
Every browser already supports importing and exporting the Netscape Bookmark file format [1]. Is it a great format? ...No. But it's very widely supported and easy to parse. [1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/internet-explorer/ie-developer/platform-apis/aa753582(v=vs.85) https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/...
mathiaspoint 1y ago
Most browsers already have built-in support for bidirectional sync with a very plain bookmarks.html file. Even lynx/elinks. This is what I do.
lolive 1y ago
I use Obsidian for that. A note=a URL, a screenshot, an explanation.
shubham13596 1y ago
this is interesting but anyone has tried to create a small scale version of their own search engine using only their bookmark links. I am surprised why that's not more common. If someone has 5k+ bookmark links and wants only results from those links given a query, it should be straightforward.
- bandie91 1y ago
  YaCy.net does something like this AFAIR
4fips 1y ago
The only browser bookmark I use is: javascript:window.prompt("Title + URL:",document.title+"\n"+document.URL); Which when clicked, opens an alert with 2 lines like this: Bookmarks.txt is a concept of keeping URLs in plain text files | Hacker News https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45047572 I then paste this into my bookmarks.txt and have a simple text editor script to perform fuzzy searching on it and open a web browser tab with the found URL.
Xeoncross 1y ago
I'm sure there are a lot of people like me that question if keeping bookmarks is actually worth it anymore. I personally found that taking action and writing a blurb about neat things I find helps me remember it more even if I never use the bookmark/paste/share directly again. The more mental effort put towards something, the easier it is to remember.
jrm4 1y ago
Interesting. The first thing I've realized is that I need to stop looking for an all in one solution, and that for me it will be healthy to distinguish "curated" from "non-curated." I've solved the "non-curated" with Karakeep; especially its AI autotagging. Now I have to figure out the next thing I want, which is a self-hosted service that - saves bookmarks, duh - saves "readability" style copies (no need for other stuff, I just need text) - some decent method of collections beyond just tags and the last thing that is very oddly rare - publically accessible WITHOUT login (this is partly for publishing readings to classes I teach) I can't find a sweetspot of all of these, may have to just build it myself?
runjake 1y ago
What is the selling point of this over the existing bookmarks.html "standard"? How is it superior?
swasheck 1y ago
what i wish i could find would be a solution that would bookmark the page, store the full text of the page i bookmarked, with the option to highlight any important sections. the closest i've found is hypothes.is but i'd love to find an extension that maintains this information locally so that i dont have to periodically auth to a web service.
- inetknght 1y ago
  I want "save page to HTML" locally to friggen actually work
yepguy 1y ago
My new bookmark solution is email, with some extra steps to get back single click bookmarking. 1. Use Raindrop and its browser extension (or mobile app) for saving bookmarks. 2. Subscribe to the RSS feed of my new bookmarks. 3. Use Feedmail to send my bookmarks to me via email, with the full scraped article text included. Email is a durable format with lots of powerful tools and easy automation. My bookmarks and workflow can survive the death of any of these services. I can tag, search, and read my bookmarks anywhere along with all of my other feeds, newsletters, and notifications. I can also easily forward an article I've bookmarked this way, or reply to self if I want to save my own commentary on it.
- conception 1y ago
  The one thing raindrop does that’s magic is you can save all your open ios safari tabs at once. While I never go back and review the 300 open tabs I had open, i have a false sense of security of not losing something i had open.
RiverCrochet 1y ago
Needs a date field and support for tags, which can just be optional hashtags in the title. I would suggest the date field be YYYYMMDD for sortability. 20250828 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45047572 Bookmarks.txt is a concept of keeping URLs in plain text files (github.com/soulim) #bookmarking #textfiles`
- uncircle 1y ago
  Then one wonders why this isn't a CSV file.
jerlendds 1y ago
I feel seen, I do this in a markdown file which is built and uploaded to my personal site For those curious: https://studium.dev https://studium.dev - built with Quartz (https://quartz.jzhao.xyz/ https://quartz.jzhao.xyz/)
alabhyajindal 1y ago
What's wrong with using the bookmarks features provided by the browser? The one in Firefox works very well for me, plus it's synced across devices.
- wakawaka28 1y ago
  Mozilla is an ad company now, that's what.
wakawaka28 1y ago
This is a cool tool: https://github.com/jarun/buku https://github.com/jarun/buku It's not perfect (it is not synced across devices) but it fills out metadata for you and isn't tied to a browser. Another one (that does sync) is Floccus. https://floccus.org/ https://floccus.org/
godshatter 1y ago
I'm old school I guess. I keep a manually-curated index.html file that my browser uses as it's homepage on my desktop at home. I've grouped together types of bookmarks and have a few hundred URLs saved (~600 or so). Mostly YouTube creator pages. I generally search for stuff when I want to go somewhere new, then save the bookmark if it looks like I might need it often. This works for me because I don't try to sync the file. I don't browse on my phone much because I hate typing on one, and I keep work and home separated.
xertopertha 1y ago
This is basic common sense. I have been using this method for as long as I can remember. You don't need special apps other than your simple text editor. Almost all modern terminal emulators recognise URLs. You can test this by hovering your mouse over a link in a text file -- The link get underlined. Ctrl-click opens the link in the default browser. Add new URLs with a little description or a few words as tags -- all free hand on the same line as the URL. Consider using Linux "less" as it allows you to search through thousands of URLs and find what you want in seconds. Ctrl-click and you are done.

195 points by secwang 1y ago

rickcarlino 1y ago

Reminds me of GemText somewhat. https://geminiprotocol.net/docs/gemtext.gmi https://geminiprotocol.net/docs/gemtext.gmi

daft_pink 1y ago

can we just use markdown and sync with obsidian?

rendall 1y ago
No! You cannot.
anticodon 1y ago
I use buku: https://github.com/jarun/buku https://github.com/jarun/buku And Syncthing to sync with all my devices.

redkoala 1y ago

I’m using a similar format to keep my links organized on an iPhone. A bookmarks.txt note kept in Apple Notes with markdown # headings to separate each category, allowing me to not keep open 500 tabs on Safari.

dcrazy 1y ago
Why not just use actual bookmarks in Safari?
panzerboiler 1y ago
Let me check... 1331 open tabs in Safari on my iPad. Several text files with thousands of bookmarks, with various attempts at grouping. Since I cannot save myself, I save them.

KingOfCoders 1y ago

Need to take a look. For my CTO newsletter I use raindrop.io to store interesting articles I encounter, export them to CSV (like bookmarks.txt), sort, filter and remove 90%, convert them to my own format, write my content and convert them to Markdown and then to HTML with Hugo.

alexmonami 1y ago

I needed to keep the highlighted text as well. With ChatGPT I have created an extension [1] that lets me capture highlights from any webpage and send them directly to a Notion database along with the page URL, capture date, and a per-selected project tag. [1]https://github.com/sea2ocean/keeper https://github.com/sea2ocean/keeper

selcuka 1y ago

Mozilla-based browsers used to (before Firefox 3, I believe) store bookmarks as HTML (bookmarks.html) instead of using an SQLite database. It still uses a single HTML file when exporting or importing bookmarks.

dcrazy 1y ago
I was wondering if someone else would remember this.
- dariosalvi78 1y ago
  I do! And still thought it was the case! In fact the first reaction to this txt thing was: well, we already have them in html, why txt?
- johnisgood 1y ago
  Remember? I just exported bookmarks as a HTML a few days ago. :o
  - dcrazy 1y ago
    I was referring to the time when Bookmarks.html was Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox’s actual on-disk storage format, not just its import/export format. Editing that file would change the contents of your Bookmarks menu.
- selcuka 1y ago
  I also remember that the first web based forums used a Perl script that actually created new HTML files on the web server when someone posted a new topic, and modified the existing one when someone posted a reply. A bit similar to static web site generators today, only with endless security vulnerabilities.
  - krapp 1y ago
    You might be referring to the venerable wwwboard from Matt's Script Archive, which amazingly still exists: https://www.scriptarchive.com/wwwboard.html https://www.scriptarchive.com/wwwboard.html

crossroadsguy 1y ago

Bookmarks are something I have grown tired of. From the days of del.icio.us, I started collecting bookmarks and it kind of trickled along almost until Pinboard went on life support (or something else if you'd prefer to call that). The thing is - I just saved bookmarks, I never really utilised them ever, to find something, to go back to. I can remember once or twice and either I couldn't find anything among my bookmarks or the sites were long gone. I really don't think I personally had to consult my thousands of bookmarks (which I have now dutifully migrated to Raindrop of course, because why the hell not) in any useful sense ever. I paid for a couple of archiving services as well before realising "nah, I don't really need that, nor this recurring outgoing payment in my life". So like a lot of things on the Internet, I guess I did "bookmarking things" just for the sake of doing "bookmarking things". That reminds me of note-taking. There was a time when I used to do "note-taking exploration and research" and never really took any notes or, hell, even needed them. When I started note-taking, while I still keep an eye out for a decent app, I just pick a decent or half-decent note-taking app and I just take notes. Oh, backup and sync tools and services. Those too - there was "explore and research" and now there's "just use something damnit". "TODOing" to, yes! I am sure this tool (or philosophy? style? bookmarking architecture?) is very nice and novel. This is not at all reflecting on why or why not one should do such "things", I absolutely believe this is good and sometimes in fact results in tools/services massively good, I am just talking about this out loud wondering whether it's just me or this kind of fatigue really sets in for other people as well.

enos_feedler 1y ago
I spend most of my days wading through the web. When i come across something that excites me I share the link to apple Notes. I dont write anything. Its just a bookmark. In February I spent a week sorting 5000 links into folders. It was quite satisfying to guess why i saved things, find patterns, create an organizational structure etc. the activity yielded both motivation and direction for my personal projects.
II2II 1y ago
For some people, they have no need for bookmarks. For other people, bookmarks may be useful but the implementation is not. Reading the author's description made me realize how unbookmark-like bookmarks actually are. The current implementations are somewhat akin to creating a list of books that you like at the library. It's not so much a pointer to the information you found useful, as it is a list of books you found useful. You still have to do some digging when you go back for the book. If the book is lost, you end up having a reference to something that you cannot obtain. And if you just add books to the end of your list, you still end up having to search through the list. The only way around that is to spend time organizing your list. It's no wonder why bookmarks are useless to so many people. The author doesn't really solve the problem with bookmarks, except for one. The last one. By sticking a bookmarks file in a project directory, at least you're only searching through a list of bookmarks relevant to the project. If you are no longer interested in the project and delete it, you're also getting rid of bookmarks that you (hopefully) no longer need. It also addresses the portability of bookmarks. As far as I can tell, the only way to move bookmarks between any of the major browsers involves the use of special software or network services. Look at moving bookmarks from one Firefox installation to another: you either use online sync, export to HTML to import from HTML, or import the database (which replaces your current bookmarks with the ones being imported).

andymurd 1y ago

Isn't that how del.icio.us started all this bookmarking in the first place?

politelemon 1y ago

Given that the aim is to still visit the URL, this appears to be browser bookmarks with extra steps. I am not seeing an advantage to the external storage mechanism and the overhead it brings. Browsers have been doing an excellent job of managing bookmarks, you can tag and search for them from the address bar itself which is very convenient.

Wololooo 1y ago
Well, actually I could see a use for this in specific context and use cases, for instance if you happen to have different dev environments you're able to just move from machine to machine while keeping all the bookmarks in the repository. If you organise them you can even reference them from the codebase, or the documentation to avoid clutter. The format is simple and dumb enough so that a simple bookmark.txt can be converted into a dictionary, array that can be used in the program if some URLs are supposed to be used there. It's not revolutionary by any means, but I have to confess that it didn't occur to me that's a great per repo documentation reference tool or per folder.
- adastra22 1y ago
  You don’t have bookmark sync in your browser?
  - teiferer 1y ago
    Is there a reliable standard to do this across browser vendors and versions and not have to rely on a proprietary cloud implementation on somebody's server?
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - adithyassekhar 1y ago
      I think bookmarks.html is pretty standard.

pmlnr 1y ago

Don't. Link rot is harsh. Something like wallabag saved so much content for me that is otherwise now lost.

bmacho 1y ago
Ctrl+s > ctrl+d. No link rot + it's available without internet.
- account42 1y ago
  Ideally, Ctrl+D would do both so you have a backup but also can check the current state for content that receives updates.
3036e4 1y ago
Scrapbook was (is?) great, since it does everything bookmarks do plus saves a copy of the page just the way it currently looks and makes that available in the browser. I switched to saving pages using SinglePage instead, that saves the current page as a single stand-alone HTML file. It loses the bookmark-like features, but I can sort those saved files easier in my file system to keep them like any other downloaded documents on various topics. Each file also by default has a comment near the top with its original URL, so it would be easy to write a script to find all of those and build something like bookmarks.html.

Brajeshwar 1y ago

I do this, albeit, kinda a Start Page. I like it because it is plain-text, and I can access it from any browser (not just the ones I bookmarked with). Mine is online (rendered client-side) so I can access it from anywhere. https://start.oinam.com https://start.oinam.com Just in case, anyone wants to look the source is at https://github.com/oinam/start https://github.com/oinam/start

bhaney 1y ago
Thank you for that "Void" tool. Very pleasant.
heyyfurqan 1y ago
thanks for the tool, gonna build a similar one for myself :)
wener 1y ago
I just track my bookmark as Awesome https://wener.me/notes/tags/awesome https://wener.me/notes/tags/awesome The source is at https://github.com/wenerme/wener https://github.com/wenerme/wener I found it's very useful, especially the license and basic tech stack & description. One day I will grab the meta and display along with the link.
shreyaha 1y ago
i tried Void for a moment to meditate. great stuff!

sdovan1 1y ago

I never really used browser bookmarks until I discovered Firefox's bookmark keyword feature [1]. It basically eliminates the search step. For example, I set "pr" to the GitHub pull request page. Just press Alt + D to focus the address bar, type the keyword, and hit Enter. [1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/bookmarks-firefox#w_how-to-use-keywords-with-bookmarks https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/bookmarks-firefox#w_how...

3036e4 1y ago
I configured Firefox to only ever auto-complete to bookmarks or open tabs, never some random thing from my browser history. That also makes it very easy to find specific pages and I do not have to memorize any tags.
Pooge 1y ago
I don't know why nobody uses that feature. I have quite a few. For example, Wikipedia (w), Wiktionary (wt), Go docs (go), ... Saves me a middleman request.
- fransje26 1y ago
  > Saves me a middleman request. Saving the earth one request (less) at a time!

AbuAssar 1y ago

I have become somewhat disillusioned with maintaining a list of bookmarks, as I often discover that the URLs are no longer functional when revisiting pages that have been bookmarked for an extended period.

teiferer 1y ago
Use archive.org for permalinks?
- kragen 1y ago
  Archive.org is always at risk of being shut down.

kragen 1y ago

I've been doing exactly this for ten years, keeping the bookmarks file in Git. I added 70 bookmarks today, which is more than average. But rather than just a "title" I have whatever seems like I might want to search for later, including if the link rots. So it's more of a summmary. With hashtags. In Markdown (though without newlines). Each new day gets a header. Here's Sunday, with blank lines added to get reasonable formatting on HN: links from 02025-08-24: https://archive.org/details/TheDesignOfSwitchingCircuits/page/n227/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/TheDesignOfSwitchingCircuits/pag... My childhood book on digital logic (including a little #electronics) as an #ebook. #hardware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-intensity_discharge_lamp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-intensity_discharge_lamp sodium-arc and mercury-arc lamps are also HID lamps. #hardware https://archive.org/details/ge-glow-lamp-manual-1966/page/n1/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/ge-glow-lamp-manual-1966/page/n1... scan of GE’s glow-lamp manual for neon lamps from 01966. #ebook #hardware #electronics #history https://youtu.be/Nn5v59l2Xec?t=64 https://youtu.be/Nn5v59l2Xec?t=64 VEMAG brand double-screw extruder screw pump #mechanisms pumping M&Ms and ground meat. #video footage of the parts being washed. https://www.radiomuseum.org/r/aleksandro_arz_51_arz51.html https://www.radiomuseum.org/r/aleksandro_arz_51_arz51.html very pretty old radio https://www.nature.com/articles/nmat2141 https://www.nature.com/articles/nmat2141 "Superlenses" to overcome the diffraction limit, #optics #paper from 02008 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_length#Electrical_lengthening_and_shortening https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_length#Electrical_l... electrically long and short #antennas and loading coils and whatnot. #electronics #communications #radio https://www.ornl.gov/publication/evaluation-power-fluidic-pumping-technology-molten-salt-reactor-applications https://www.ornl.gov/publication/evaluation-power-fluidic-pu... #fluidics for pumping in #molten-salt #nuclear-reactors (just an abstract) https://www.hopefulmons.com/p/in-defense-of-tech-trees https://www.hopefulmons.com/p/in-defense-of-tech-trees trying to use "tech trees" to understand the #history of technological development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresnel_diffraction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresnel_diffraction near-field #diffraction is "Fresnel diffraction" #optics https://psi329.cankaya.edu.tr/uploads/files/Lewis-PernFascistInquiry-1980.pdf https://psi329.cankaya.edu.tr/uploads/files/Lewis-PernFascis... Was #Perón a fascist? #fascism #history #PDF #paper #toread https://lwn.net/Articles/1030818/ https://lwn.net/Articles/1030818/ #Treacherous-Computing for “confidential VMs” #privacy despite #Linux #virtualization #toread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44950482 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44950482 discussion of alternative ways to run graphical apps inside #Docker, including maybe drawing in a web browser https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44991638 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44991638 my post about how #Rust’s approach to handling #Unicode introduces unnecessary bugs into command-line programs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WApL1EL2GMk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WApL1EL2GMk #Frondizi speaks about #Perón. #history #Argentina #video https://github.com/3b1b/manim https://github.com/3b1b/manim Manim math #animation software for morphing equations and plots and stuff into each other, using FFmpeg, OpenGL, LaTeX, and Pango https://nvmexpress.org/wp-content/uploads/September-2020_NVMe-Zoned-Namespace-SSDs-The-Zoned-Storage-Linux-Software-Ecosystem.pdf https://nvmexpress.org/wp-content/uploads/September-2020_NVM... in ZNS #zoned-storage a zone must be a power-of-2 number of LBAs, unlike in ZAC and ZBC #PDF #toread https://docs.kernel.org/filesystems/f2fs.html https://docs.kernel.org/filesystems/f2fs.html "f2fs" is the #Flash friendly #filesystem for #zoned-storage. “F2FS is a file system exploiting NAND flash memory-based storage devices, which is based on Log-structured File System (#LFS). The design has been focused on addressing the fundamental issues in LFS, which are snowball effect of wandering tree and high cleaning overhead.” ———⁂——— Here's today, ten years ago, so you can see how my bookmarking style has developed: links from 2015-08-28: http://www.excamera.com/sphinx/article-j1a-swapforth.html http://www.excamera.com/sphinx/article-j1a-swapforth.html A free-software #Forth operating system running on the J1a open-source CPU running on a Lattice #FPGA thanks to Project #IceStorm’s reverse engineering and the resulting free-software #synthesis and programming toolchain, running on the Lattice iCEstick evaluation board with 8K of RAM. #J1 #hardware https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRVaLUQUmA8&list=PLACB124F79F677B6A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRVaLUQUmA8&list=PLACB124F79... A 2009 #video lecture series on #mecheng manufacturing processes by “nptelhrd”, Prof. Inderdeep Singh at IIT Roorkee. Some problems with the audio, seems to be a bit clipped. However, the video is entirely a talking head and a bunch of PowerPoint slides, so the only way you would watch this video to learn about powder metallurgy instead of reading a book is if you are dyslexic or have a beard fetish. At least it doesn’t have shitty elevator music. http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/ http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/ The USGS gives #pricing information on a variety of mineral #materials, including some historical stuff. #minerals http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/titanium/mcs-2015-titan.pdf http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/titanium/mc... #Titanium #pricing in the US has gone from US$9.62/kg in 2010 to US$11.20/kg in 2014. Nearby pages use dollars per pound, but the prices per kg show a sharp reduction from its peak of US$17.28 in 2005, but it had a low of US$6.50 in 2003, US$9.70 in 1995, and US$8.26 in 1992–3. This means that the FFC Cambridge Process is not in production yet. http://pubs.usgs.gov/sir/2012/5188/ http://pubs.usgs.gov/sir/2012/5188/ A #PDF with a bunch of metal #materials #pricing for 1970–2010. Comprehensive, covers nearly all metals and some semimetals. Unfortunately at least some prices use folk units like pounds instead of SI. http://rebeccasolnit.net/essay/a-rape-a-minute-a-thousand-corpses-a-year/ http://rebeccasolnit.net/essay/a-rape-a-minute-a-thousand-co... Rebecca Solnit talks a bit about #rape and #intimate-partner-violence. #feminism https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2015/08/06/2015-18402/equipment-authorization-and-electronic-labeling-for-wireless-devices https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2015/08/06/2015-184... The FCC is proposing to outlaw #free-software for wireless firmware. https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/4732/emulate-an-intel-8086-cpu https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/4732/emulate-an... Programmers competing to do Intel 8086 (subset) #emulation in different languages, including a C program in 348 lines. ———⁂——— Perhaps surprisingly, of those 8 links from ten years ago, only one has really linkrotted; unsurprisingly it's Solnit's essay. But it survives in the Archive. The titanum PDF redirects to the general titanium Mineral Commodities Summary page. Emacs full-text search is surprisingly often effective at finding relevant information. Grep (or M-x occur, its moral equivalent) works even more often. F6 opens the URL in my browser. Emacs C-s can search those 12000 bookmarks faster than I can type. At some point in the past I wrote a Chrome extension that would show me all the links for a given hashtag with their descriptions (formatted as Markdown), with the hashtags being links to other similar hashtag pages, and also let me bookmark pages from within the browser interface, but I don't know where it is now. It wouldn't work with Manifest v3 anyway.

glxxyz 1y ago

I bookmark pages in Chrome just so autocomplete will find them. I almost never look back at the actual bookmarks any more.

lkuty 1y ago

I think that is a good idea to keep URLs as text. I use the Tab Session Manager extension which allows me to export saved sessions (title, URL, with a little bit of extra stuff) as text (json actually, a little bit too verbose) and I also use Eagle Filer to save entire web pages, just in case it disappears from the web, which happens quite regularly. What I want is the title of the web page associated with its URL and maybe extra keywords. I don't use classic browser bookmarks much anymore.

jibal 1y ago

I use emacs org mode files ... much more functional.

nairadithya 1y ago
Could you go over how you save bookmarks with Emacs, I'm curious as a fellow Emacs user.
- jibal 1y ago
  I have a key combo bound to https://github.com/rexim/org-cliplink https://github.com/rexim/org-cliplink
- tconfrey 1y ago
  Take a look at BrainTool. It's a bookmarks/tabs/todo-manager browser extension that writes to an org-mode syntax text file. Allows you to capture notes, containment hierarchy, to-do state etc and expose it all to your org PKMS. (Disclosure, I'm the developer.) https://braintool.org https://braintool.org https://github.com/tconfrey/BrainTool https://github.com/tconfrey/BrainTool
  - jibal 1y ago
    Does it work in Edge?

mlcq 1y ago

I like plain text; it looks clean and tidy. I think I'll give this a try.

rajnathani 1y ago

This is needed, TIL but only till recently did Firefox remove their bookmarks limit, it was something like 6000 about 3 years ago. (For those curious about why one needs so many bookmarks, similar to maybe some other people, I use the bookmark feature as a "like" to save articles/URLs I find interesting).

johnisgood 1y ago
Same, I have many folders with subfolders of related stuff, and on top, I have "sessions" as well, and lots of notes (Vivaldi).

yegle 1y ago

My way of managing bookmarks is to just print the page as a PDF, save PDF in a Google Drive folder. Then you can do full text search quickly.

aa-jv 1y ago
Same, been doing this since the start of the web. I have decades of web pages I've found interesting over the years, and its all offline/local searchable and will be there for me when the grid goes down. I'm part-way through getting the 90,000+ PDF files collected in this manner, analyzed by an LLM so I can .. query it about my own interests, I guess? ;) I don't find that saving URL's is very productive - they are the dangling pointer of the web. Far better to have your own cache of docs to refer to imho ..
chongli 1y ago
I mostly bookmark sites, not pages, so this wouldn’t capture the information I want.

Muvasa 1y ago

I actually do this. I put urls and files in a text file. Which I parse with rofi. The reason why I do this is so I can just open rofi with a shortcut and type out the name of the file or url and instantly open it.

renegat0x0 1y ago

I think that people who say they prefer keeping a simple file has never found a good app for bookmarking. There is still a space for killer app with bookmarks. I think that simple URL bookmarking is just wrong. It simply will not work for big bookmarking data sets. The key is using tags, and rating system, and automatic update which checks if URLs are even valid any more. I also thought that we miss a killer RSS app. That is why I created my own self-hosted app. - it can store bookmarks - it gather news through RSS - it provides tags (I can search bookmarks by tags) - it provides user ratings (I can filter using it too) - I can filter, or order by link, date of publish, date of creation, etc. etc. - It checks if links are rotten (and marks them) - I can mark link to read it for later - I can see how many times I have visited a link - I can check 'related links' to jump to things I have jump before from this link On the other hand, I am quite certain that I use it, because it is 'tailored for me'. I am not that interested in the looks. I know how it works - https://rumca-js.github.io/search https://rumca-js.github.io/search - demo search - https://rumca-js.github.io/music https://rumca-js.github.io/music - demo music - https://rumca-js.github.io/bookmarks https://rumca-js.github.io/bookmarks - demo bookmarks - https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database - database of bookmarks - https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database - link meta information - https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive - main crawling engine using for all databases

pacifika 1y ago

Just in case, If you want to index the content of these bookmarks for searching maybe my little wip tool face is useful to you. As it’s also a local server you can use a keyword search in browsers for it. https://github.com/svandragt/fafi https://github.com/svandragt/fafi

darekkay 1y ago

I've been maintaining my bookmarks as plain text (YAML) for years, which I then turn into a single interactive HTML file [1]. [1] https://darekkay.com/static-marks/ https://darekkay.com/static-marks/

Ciantic 1y ago

I have my own Chrome/Firefox extension that shows bookmarks in the new tab page ordered by recency with a search field on top, it's pretty good for me. Every time I open a new tab, I see the latest bookmarks I've added. Granted, I don't usually bother to browse older ones, but at least I see ~15 new ones on (desktop monitor) every day. Also, I sometimes add a snippet of text from the content to the title of the bookmark, making it easier to search afterwards.

dkdcio 1y ago

I’ve been doing something similar for years, more recently published at https://github.com/lostmygithubaccount/dkdc-links https://github.com/lostmygithubaccount/dkdc-links reading through this thread I’m seeing people use bookmarks to save dozens of new URLs per day, which is very surprising to me

nerd-unsecured 1y ago

(Probably skip if you don't want to read a ~rant..) Questions: - New "format"? It is a CSV with spaces as separators and no header? Why? - Global file located in the home directory? Why would you want another file to pollute the $HOME? Why not just $BOOKMARKS_FILE or something? - Local bookmarks file - why don't just reuse README.md? Add 'Resources' section and chuck markdown links in it, parsing that is not (much) harder, and you get nothing more with a separate 'bookmarks.txt' file. As some other comments pointed out, there are no tags, no (semantic) grouping, no content archiving, etc... This is just a list of URL with optional title attached to them, this is not a distinct 'concept'...

gradientsrneat 1y ago
The format itself is not as useful as the unix-like shell oneliners one crafts around it. The inflexible simplicity is therefore the point. (and also it's easy to modify manually)

est 1y ago

what problem does this solve? For frequent websites I can remember their TLD and navigate to the panel I wanted For content saving a URL is not enough. Gotta save the full page or it might be gone very soon.

__dennis__ 1y ago

I've made my own private bookmark browser extension that syncs e2ee across my devices. Because it's an extension I can open bookmarks automatically in a private tab and much more. After some years of using this extension every day I decided to make it available for others as well. You can find it here, free forever: markbook.io This was just a side project I did in about 6 months of my spare time, definitely not a polished product that's trying to become the next billion dollar enterprise.

account42 1y ago

I think this is going in the wrong direction. While cool URIs don't change [0], many URLs that you'd like to bookmark are not cool. So for bookmarks to be useful long-term you need to store much more data than just the URL. At the very least you need a timestamp to be able to find the resource you wanted to bookmark on the Internet Archive in the future. But better would be to save a snapshot of the site alongside the bookmark instead. It's a shame that no browser cares to integrate that or other relatively simple usability enhancements instead of blindly copying Chrome's UI (which usually means removing features). [0] https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI

j45 1y ago
I agree, annotating bookmarks is quite valuable, including highlights, which could also be stored in text. Logseq, etc, are tools that help facilitate this, albeit in not plain text format, but close.
imiric 1y ago
I don't think this project is necessarily going in the wrong direction, but I agree that keeping track of web URLs requires more data than just the URL and title. At the very least, I personally need tags. Tree hierarchies are too limiting, but tags allow adding free-form metadata which can be used to quickly find anything. I often don't remember the actual URL or title of a web site, but I'm looking for a general category, and with tags I'm usually able to find what I'm looking for. This does require a certain level of discipline from the user to use tags consistently, but they work well IME. These days with ML tools it's easier than ever to assign relevant tags to URLs automatically, though I would personally not rely on them because of their propensity to hallucinate and not follow conventions. And, like you say, web sites change and disappear constantly, so snapshots are important as well. I've been meaning to try SingleFile/ArchiveBox/Wallabag for months now, but I'm currently too comfortable with Pinboard. Pinboard has been working great for me for many years, contrary to the negative buzz around it, but I don't have confidence that it will stick around forever. I just hope that I can export and migrate all my snapshot data as well...
NoboruWataya 1y ago

j45 1y ago

Feels strange to wonder how far things have abstracted that text files feel like a concept.

smusamashah 1y ago

I have been keeping lists of urls in https://gist.github.com https://gist.github.com as markdown files. Someone even made a shortcut http://gist.new/ http://gist.new/ It has been very useful. URLs are super easy to modify, super easy to share, super easy to open, add notes etc. Having a gist adds the ability to share a set or URLs and people can comment on them. I could (if i want to) use github API and a browser extension to put bookmarks directly in a gist as plaintext

teo_zero 1y ago

Reading through the comments in this thread, it looks like the population is split in two groups. The first group considers "bookmarks" as a directory of often-visited sites, and needs a way to avoid typing their URLs every time. The second group intends "bookmarks" as a wish list for sites that might need a second (deeper) visit. It may be time to find another metaphor for this second group: "postcards" might work better than "bookmarks".

deafpolygon 1y ago
the second group is why read-it-later services exist.

iamcalledrob 1y ago

The underappreciated .url file / [InternetShortcut] format seems like a much better fit for this: 1. 20+ years of OS support for double-click to open 2. It already supports an embedded title. 3. It's basically just INI/TOML, so you can add custom fields that get ignored by parsers. Want to embed a screenshot? Just append Screenshot=B64(data). Want to add tags? Same deal. You can also organise them as files in...folders.

eadmund 1y ago
> It's basically just INI/TOML That’s a dealbreaker for me. I like something that I can use grep and other Unix utilities on. There’s a reason that the tabular style formats of /etc/passwd, crontab and inetd exist. > You can also organise them as files in...folders. +1 on this concept, though. For some reason folks forget that the filesystem is a pretty decent hierarchical database!
- iamcalledrob 1y ago
  It's really just Key=Value, with [InternetShortcut] as the first line. Should be pretty easy to grep through. It's an absolutely minimal format
- z3ratul163071 1y ago
  I have tool creating html files like this: <html><head><meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; URL='https://www.someurl.com https://www.someurl.com' " /></head><body></body></html> upon opening these htmls , the browser just redirects to the actual url.
Lammy 1y ago
FreeDesktop-dot-org also has a Desktop Entry spec with a `URL=` key and is what you get if you drag an address bar favicon to a folder on a Lunix desktop: https://specifications.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/latest/recognized-keys.html#key-url https://specifications.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/la...

habibur 1y ago

Did the same, with the following differences : - tab separator instead of space. you don't need cut -d with tabs. tab is the default separator for cut. - use xsel -b to capture clipboard data while adding. Copy the URL into from browser to clipboard. And then run on console $ url.add hn bookmark script # all parameters are keyword tags. The script fetches the URL from clipboard $(xsel -b)

Shorel 1y ago

I am using a private instance of Wallabag, it stores the "bookmarks", the metadata, optional tags, and saves a copy of the content that gets synced to my e-reader.

chongli 1y ago

Does anyone have a solution for full-text search of a folder of bookmarks? Specifically I want to search the sites themselves, not merely the text of the home pages (which is where the URLs point). The specific problem I’m trying to solve is searching for seeds. I have about 20 different seed vendors bookmarked I want to search across all of their seed catalogues at once (without having to visit each site to search one at a time). More broadly though I would love the ability to do custom / curated search. A search engine designed for searching collections of sites instead of the entire internet would be ideal.

cluckindan 1y ago
Crawl the pages, optionally convert HTML to Markdown, and insert them into a search index, such as OpenSearch/Elasticsearch. Vibe code a script to make queries with filtering etc.
conception 1y ago
Firecrawl might be a tool for you

jim_lawless 1y ago

I have a handful of sites that I visit frequently. I wrote a script called "to" that has an embedded list of these sites' URL's along with some metadata that includes the preferred browser client and a short mnemonic name for the site. When I issue a command like: to hn The script will open the site https://news.ycombinator.com https://news.ycombinator.com with Chrome. I also have a help screen that lists the URL's and their mnemonics. Again, note that this is a very short list. I like working at a command-line so it's often faster for me to run something like this instead of typing the first few characters of a site name into a browser and waiting for the URL autocomplete to finish the URL for me.

yahoozoo 1y ago

I wish I could easily export my iPhone’s Safari “Reading List” even to something like this. I found a Shortcuts script that would do it but there are so many links I have saved that it freezes.

danhite 1y ago
> there are so many links I have saved that it freezes If you are motivated enough to write Apple Shortcuts a useful trick for ~Find type actions that overload is to Filter them into reassemblable pieces eg action find items from reading list filter Title begins with A (then do B etc) that this trick often works would be due to the internal nature of the Shortcuts implementation problems, so YMMV
- yahoozoo 1y ago
  I’ll give it a try, thanks

rafram 1y ago

Every browser already supports importing and exporting the Netscape Bookmark file format [1]. Is it a great format? ...No. But it's very widely supported and easy to parse. [1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/internet-explorer/ie-developer/platform-apis/aa753582(v=vs.85) https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/...

mathiaspoint 1y ago

Most browsers already have built-in support for bidirectional sync with a very plain bookmarks.html file. Even lynx/elinks. This is what I do.

lolive 1y ago

I use Obsidian for that. A note=a URL, a screenshot, an explanation.

shubham13596 1y ago

this is interesting but anyone has tried to create a small scale version of their own search engine using only their bookmark links. I am surprised why that's not more common. If someone has 5k+ bookmark links and wants only results from those links given a query, it should be straightforward.

bandie91 1y ago
YaCy.net does something like this AFAIR

4fips 1y ago

The only browser bookmark I use is: javascript:window.prompt("Title + URL:",document.title+"\n"+document.URL); Which when clicked, opens an alert with 2 lines like this: Bookmarks.txt is a concept of keeping URLs in plain text files | Hacker News https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45047572 I then paste this into my bookmarks.txt and have a simple text editor script to perform fuzzy searching on it and open a web browser tab with the found URL.

Xeoncross 1y ago

I'm sure there are a lot of people like me that question if keeping bookmarks is actually worth it anymore. I personally found that taking action and writing a blurb about neat things I find helps me remember it more even if I never use the bookmark/paste/share directly again. The more mental effort put towards something, the easier it is to remember.

jrm4 1y ago

Interesting. The first thing I've realized is that I need to stop looking for an all in one solution, and that for me it will be healthy to distinguish "curated" from "non-curated." I've solved the "non-curated" with Karakeep; especially its AI autotagging. Now I have to figure out the next thing I want, which is a self-hosted service that - saves bookmarks, duh - saves "readability" style copies (no need for other stuff, I just need text) - some decent method of collections beyond just tags and the last thing that is very oddly rare - publically accessible WITHOUT login (this is partly for publishing readings to classes I teach) I can't find a sweetspot of all of these, may have to just build it myself?

runjake 1y ago

What is the selling point of this over the existing bookmarks.html "standard"? How is it superior?

swasheck 1y ago

what i wish i could find would be a solution that would bookmark the page, store the full text of the page i bookmarked, with the option to highlight any important sections. the closest i've found is hypothes.is but i'd love to find an extension that maintains this information locally so that i dont have to periodically auth to a web service.

inetknght 1y ago
I want "save page to HTML" locally to friggen actually work

yepguy 1y ago

My new bookmark solution is email, with some extra steps to get back single click bookmarking. 1. Use Raindrop and its browser extension (or mobile app) for saving bookmarks. 2. Subscribe to the RSS feed of my new bookmarks. 3. Use Feedmail to send my bookmarks to me via email, with the full scraped article text included. Email is a durable format with lots of powerful tools and easy automation. My bookmarks and workflow can survive the death of any of these services. I can tag, search, and read my bookmarks anywhere along with all of my other feeds, newsletters, and notifications. I can also easily forward an article I've bookmarked this way, or reply to self if I want to save my own commentary on it.

conception 1y ago
The one thing raindrop does that’s magic is you can save all your open ios safari tabs at once. While I never go back and review the 300 open tabs I had open, i have a false sense of security of not losing something i had open.

RiverCrochet 1y ago

Needs a date field and support for tags, which can just be optional hashtags in the title. I would suggest the date field be YYYYMMDD for sortability. 20250828 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45047572 Bookmarks.txt is a concept of keeping URLs in plain text files (github.com/soulim) #bookmarking #textfiles`

uncircle 1y ago
Then one wonders why this isn't a CSV file.

jerlendds 1y ago

I feel seen, I do this in a markdown file which is built and uploaded to my personal site For those curious: https://studium.dev https://studium.dev - built with Quartz (https://quartz.jzhao.xyz/ https://quartz.jzhao.xyz/)

alabhyajindal 1y ago

What's wrong with using the bookmarks features provided by the browser? The one in Firefox works very well for me, plus it's synced across devices.

wakawaka28 1y ago
Mozilla is an ad company now, that's what.

wakawaka28 1y ago

This is a cool tool: https://github.com/jarun/buku https://github.com/jarun/buku It's not perfect (it is not synced across devices) but it fills out metadata for you and isn't tied to a browser. Another one (that does sync) is Floccus. https://floccus.org/ https://floccus.org/

godshatter 1y ago

I'm old school I guess. I keep a manually-curated index.html file that my browser uses as it's homepage on my desktop at home. I've grouped together types of bookmarks and have a few hundred URLs saved (~600 or so). Mostly YouTube creator pages. I generally search for stuff when I want to go somewhere new, then save the bookmark if it looks like I might need it often. This works for me because I don't try to sync the file. I don't browse on my phone much because I hate typing on one, and I keep work and home separated.

xertopertha 1y ago

This is basic common sense. I have been using this method for as long as I can remember. You don't need special apps other than your simple text editor. Almost all modern terminal emulators recognise URLs. You can test this by hovering your mouse over a link in a text file -- The link get underlined. Ctrl-click opens the link in the default browser. Add new URLs with a little description or a few words as tags -- all free hand on the same line as the URL. Consider using Linux "less" as it allows you to search through thousands of URLs and find what you want in seconds. Ctrl-click and you are done.