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

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

by secwang • 11 months ago

195 158 11 months ago

github.com

daft_pink• 11 months ago

can we just use markdown and sync with obsidian?

rendall• 11 months ago

No! You cannot.

anticodon• 11 months ago

I use buku: https://github.com/jarun/buku And Syncthing to sync with all my devices.

rickcarlino• 11 months ago

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

redkoala• 11 months 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.

dcrazy4• 11 months ago

Why not just use actual bookmarks in Safari?

panzerboiler• 11 months 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• 11 months 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• 11 months 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

selcuka3• 11 months 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.

dcrazy4• 11 months ago

I was wondering if someone else would remember this.

johnisgood2• 11 months ago

Remember? I just exported bookmarks as a HTML a few days ago. :o

dariosalvi78• 11 months 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?

selcuka3• 11 months 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.

dgl• 11 months ago

Chrome can also import/export in this format, chrome://bookmarks, dots menu at the top right, export bookmarks.

The file it generates has:

    <!DOCTYPE NETSCAPE-Bookmark-file-1>

SnuffBox• 11 months ago

It was a holdover from NetScape. I found it worked quite well and made it easy to share my bookmarks on my website.

crossroadsguy2• 11 months 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• 11 months 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• 11 months 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).

crossroadsguy2• 11 months ago

I see your point. Also, maybe to add to it, I should have been rather judicious in collecting bookmarks.

And — possibly to also literally keep them inside the browser’s default bookmarks/favourites whatever browser one uses. Not on some fancy service with AI and what not.

snackbroken• 11 months ago

You still have to do some digging when you go back for the book.

There is widespread browser support for linking directly to text fragments[1] which makes it possible to link to arbitrary parts of documents even when the author hasn't marked up some nearby element with an id to target, like so: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45047572#:~:text=You%20...

Unfortunately, Firefox provides no convenient way of creating such links, but Chromium has a "Copy link to highlight" context menu entry when you have text highlighted. Neither Firefox nor Chromium provide a convenient way to create a bookmark to a text fragment.

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.

Both Firefox and Chromium support importing/exporting bookmarks from/to "HTML" (really, Netscape bookmark file format[2]).

Both browsers also provide the means to organize bookmarks into folders, and Firefox lets you add arbitrary tags to them as well. Alas as you say, the only way is to spend time manually organizing them. Automatically suggesting folders/tags (preferring ones you already have created) seems like an ideal use case for LLMs or other NLP tools. Ideally browsers would offer an option to save a snapshot of the page together with the bookmark, that would guard against link rot and enable full text search. We have the technology, it's really only a matter of improving the UI and linking the two features together. Too bad hamstringing adblockers, gimping sites that rely on XSLT, and implementing WebBluetooth or whatever has higher priority.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/URI/Reference/F... [2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/...

alisonatwork• 11 months ago

Bookmarks are useful for address bar autocomplete back to a site I know I visit semi-regularly, but for whatever reason disappeared out of my browser's autocomplete history. E.g. this might happen for social media sites that I only ever visit inside an incognito tab to try (probably in vain) to mitigate being tracked across visits. But also it can happen when I try a new browser or my phone resets itself or whatever. Then I just export the bookmarks.html from my laptop and import it on whatever other device.

I never bothered to look at the schema of the bookmarks.html, because feels like it's worked the same for 20+ years. I used to care a lot about housekeeping the structure, but it doesn't really matter, as long as they're in the bucket the browser will use them for autocomplete suggestions, so...

kiicia• 11 months ago

having bookmark you don't use is one thing, but linkrot of that one bookmark you actually do need is much worse

jcynix• 11 months ago

To combat link rot I use an applet which looks up a link at archive.org and when I visit an interesting site (of supposedly longer lasting value) I check if it's archived already. If not I ask the way back machine to store it.

tugberkk• 11 months ago

you can write a program which randomly opens up a bookmark so you can get notified at least per some day/week.

selectnull• 11 months ago

and then write a program which detects a randomly opened bookmark and closes it because i'm in the middle of something important and can't be bothered right now.

t-3• 11 months ago

Not really the same, but I find bookmark folders to be pretty useful. I have a "daily", "weekly", "taxes", etc., and it's just one click to open them all up in one go. They could easily be converted into a cron job with a plaintext URL list like TFA.

donkeybeer• 11 months ago

They have always been useful to me. Whenever I had problems, it turns out because I hadn't bookmarked enough. In general I bookmark for anything that I knew once and found difficult to search for the next time when I forgot about it.

lurk2• 11 months ago

The chief use case is saving the titles of YouTube videos so that you can reconstruct a playlist when the videos are removed.

jp1016• 11 months ago

Totally agree with you I have had the same experience. Most of the bookmarks I saved over the years, I never went back to. These days I usually just copy content, run a quick summary through ChatGPT, and if its useful I keep it as a note. That way I dont have to keep deferring things in an endless bookmark pile.

Now I mostly keep two kinds of bookmarks: quick-access ones for work (like repos I contribute to or PR sections I need to check often), and then more organized notes for ideas, projects, or interests I want to revisit later. To make that easier, I use a little tool I put together (beavergrow.com) where I can group bookmarks into blocks and keep notes alongside them—it’s been handy for giving some structure without overcomplicating things.

motorest3• 11 months ago

The thing is - I just saved bookmarks, I never really utilised them ever, to find something, to go back to.

You're not describing a bookmarks issue. You're describing a personal organization issue, which is reflected on how you manage bookmarks.

You're voicing the exact same sort of complains often directed at todo lists. In fact, from your description you're implicitly treating bookmarks as ad-hoc Todo lists, and you're complaining your To-do backlog is growing.

Like others, you can blame bookmarks and Todo lists for your growing backlog of things you want to do but never get around to doing. Those are not the problem though, and only reflect a symptom caused by the actual problem.

So like a lot of things on the Internet, I guess I did "bookmarking things" just for the sake of doing "bookmarking things".

You're describing a symptom of your problem. The fact that it extends beyond bookmarks is a telltale sign.

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.

I believe you're expressing the same issues expressed by those who have trouble managing their task queue. Your problem reflects on bookmarks, on personal notes, on productivity software, etc. This means your problem is not bookmarks, or personal notes, or productivity software. It's something else that is reflected across tools and systems.

I have a huge bookmark collection, but I don't care if I saved a bookmark that I never opened. I configured my browsers to exclusively use bookmarks in recommendations, thus serving as an ad-hoc search engine of noteworthy links I visited or want to visit. If I don't visit any of the links, that's too bad. Why would it present a problem?

esafak2• 11 months ago

Because it represents wasted time and cognitive load. It's a vestigial habit from an era when search was bad. Between (AI) search and browser history, I don't see much need for bookmarks.

deafpolygon2• 11 months ago

I bookmark things so I can look them up when I search in the addressbar. If it’s bookmarked, the result is higher than my search engine results— making them quicker to find again.

j453• 11 months ago

This resonated because I realized my relationship to bookmarks was different - I don't save bookmarks, I save or want to remember sentences and saving a bookmark wasn't the best way to do that.

I try to read little I am not looking to apply, or be conscious it's for pleasure/interest

If I bookmark something, I consider it unread. If I read something, I make sure I bookmark and annotate it and tag it to make my mind more actively work with what I'm reading (and make it easer to find.)

The result? 10-15 years of every link I've ever saved, organized and annotated by me. Chronological, sorted, I can see what I was paying attention to chronologically, or by topic, and at any time search any of my highlights and notes.

This is the nice part because it isn't an AI tool, but maybe something that can feed into an AI tool quite nice. My curation, where relevant, as input.

Best of all, it just works. It's not heavy or tedious, anything that has my attention, gets my attention.

The one thing a text only approach will not solve is that URIs while universally defined will not perpetually stay online.

Diigo, and other tools like it allow you to save your own cache, or perhaps submit to a public cache that page so once it invariably goes offline, it doesn't.

There's lots of tools out there to help with this each person's way, I liked diigo.com, but lately think tools like logseq with a few basic plugins are offering a lot of promise to directly save a bookmark, whatever snippets are relevant, and they are always and instantly searchable.

imiric2• 11 months ago

The thing is - I just saved bookmarks, I never really utilised them ever, to find something, to go back to.

Everyone's workflow is different, but I personally do this often. I bookmark something interesting or valuable precisely because I might want to come back to it at some point. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't, and that's fine. But when I'm looking for good software that does X, a good place to stay in an interesting location, or a good product in a specific category, my bookmarks are the first place I check. It sure beats relying on web search results and having to navigate around ads, spam, scams, astroturfed forum discussions, morally bankrupt SEO-hacked listicle sites, social media garbage, and the modern web dumpster fire.

theshrike79• 11 months ago

For me bookmarks are this "I know I saw this somewhere..." thing. Sometimes searching All of Internet for that one specific source isn't efficient.

Which means that spending 10 seconds tagging and categorising a link before saving it becomes really useful.

If I suspect even a little that the site or content might disappear (completely or behind a paywall) later, I use Obsidian's Web Clipper to save the whole text locally.

andymurd• 11 months ago

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

politelemon• 11 months 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.

Wololooo2• 11 months 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.

_kidlike• 11 months ago

we do something similar. IntelliJ (ultimate) has a text-based http client included. Like postman but you can commit .http files to the repo. Then this client has variables which can come from a json file. So basically all URLs that our software uses, are in that file. Eventually this led to the json file being used by scripts too.

adastra22• 11 months ago

You don’t have bookmark sync in your browser?

kevinmgranger• 11 months ago

I've often wished I could find back-references and search my bookmarks as if they were part of my Obsidian database. This would help with that.

nvllsvm• 11 months ago

I keep bookmarks as a Markdown file so I can sync it using Syncthing. I use either Obsidian or KRunner (desktop-only, similar to mac's Spotlight) to open bookmarks. It's been working well enough for me.

The KRunner plugin I use doesn't have a comprehensive Markdown parser, but it works great with the format I've been using. https://github.com/andrewrabert/krunner-markdown-bookmarks Ex:

  # Bookmarks
  ## Code
  - [GitHub](https://github.com)
  - [GitLab - Arch Linux](https://gitlab.archlinux.org)
  ## Social
  - [Hacker News](https://news.ycombinator.com)
  - [Reddit](https://www.reddit.com)

It would be cool to have an Obsidian plugin which retrieved favicons for the links.

newlisp• 11 months ago

chrome doesn't have tags for bookmarks though.

pmlnr• 11 months ago

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

bmacho• 11 months ago

Ctrl+s > ctrl+d.

No link rot + it's available without internet.

account422• 11 months ago

Ideally, Ctrl+D would do both so you have a backup but also can check the current state for content that receives updates.

3036e42• 11 months 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• 11 months 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

Just in case, anyone wants to look the source is at https://github.com/oinam/start

bhaney• 11 months ago

Thank you for that "Void" tool. Very pleasant.

heyyfurqan• 11 months ago

thanks for the tool, gonna build a similar one for myself :)

wener• 11 months ago

I just track my bookmark as Awesome https://wener.me/notes/tags/awesome

The source is at 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• 11 months ago

i tried Void for a moment to meditate. great stuff!

sdovan1• 11 months 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...

3036e42• 11 months 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• 11 months 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• 11 months ago

Saves me a middleman request.

Saving the earth one request (less) at a time!

AbuAssar• 11 months 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.

teiferer3• 11 months ago

Use archive.org for permalinks?

kragen3• 11 months ago

Archive.org is always at risk of being shut down.

glxxyz• 11 months ago

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

kragen3• 11 months 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/pag... My childhood book on digital logic (including a little #electronics) as an #ebook. #hardware

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... scan of GE’s glow-lamp manual for neon lamps from 01966. #ebook #hardware #electronics #history

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 very pretty old radio

https://www.nature.com/articles/nmat2141 "Superlenses" to overcome the diffraction limit, #optics #paper from 02008

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-pu... #fluidics for pumping in #molten-salt #nuclear-reactors (just an abstract)

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 near-field #diffraction is "Fresnel diffraction" #optics

https://psi329.cankaya.edu.tr/uploads/files/Lewis-PernFascis... Was #Perón a fascist? #fascism #history #PDF #paper #toread

https://lwn.net/Articles/1030818/ #Treacherous-Computing for “confidential VMs” #privacy despite #Linux #virtualization #toread

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 my post about how #Rust’s approach to handling #Unicode introduces unnecessary bugs into command-line programs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WApL1EL2GMk #Frondizi speaks about #Perón. #history #Argentina #video

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_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 "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 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=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/ The USGS gives #pricing information on a variety of mineral #materials, including some historical stuff. #minerals

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/ 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-co... Rebecca Solnit talks a bit about #rape and #intimate-partner-violence. #feminism

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... 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.

secwang• 11 months ago

I like your way , So I pick up my long time not used emacs. It's work fine.

kragen3• 11 months ago

It should work fine in pretty much any text editor, but after you have a few thousand URLs, some of them might start to slow down a bit on searching. But you'll always have grep.

lkuty• 11 months 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.

jibal3• 11 months ago

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

nairadithya• 11 months ago

Could you go over how you save bookmarks with Emacs, I'm curious as a fellow Emacs user.

jibal3• 11 months ago

I have a key combo bound to https://github.com/rexim/org-cliplink

tconfrey• 11 months 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://github.com/tconfrey/BrainTool

mlcq• 11 months ago

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

rajnathani• 11 months 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).

johnisgood2• 11 months 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• 11 months 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• 11 months 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 ..

chongli2• 11 months ago

I mostly bookmark sites, not pages, so this wouldn’t capture the information I want.

Muvasa• 11 months 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• 11 months 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 - demo search

- https://rumca-js.github.io/music - demo music

- https://rumca-js.github.io/bookmarks - demo bookmarks

- https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database - database of bookmarks

- https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database - link meta information

- https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive - main crawling engine using for all databases

pacifika• 11 months 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

darekkay• 11 months 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/

Ciantic• 11 months 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• 11 months ago

I’ve been doing something similar for years, more recently published at 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• 11 months 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• 11 months 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• 11 months 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__• 11 months 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.

account422• 11 months 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

j453• 11 months 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.

imiric2• 11 months 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• 11 months ago

Bookmarks for me are mostly useful as quick links to highly "dynamic" sites (like HN), where offline snapshots are less useful, or for massive sites that are not quick to snapshot, like Wikipedia (an offline snapshot of Wikipedia is definitely useful, I just don't think the browser is the right tool for that).

For long-form content that I want to come back and read later, I find Wallabag is quite good. For making snapshots of large websites I use Kiwix.

JulianWasTaken• 11 months ago

It's a shame that no browser cares to integrate that

I'm trying out using the Obsidian Web Clipper extension, which essentially does this (and using it for anything I'd previously have bookmarked).

cluckindan2• 11 months ago

Even better would be snapshotting the page multiple times with exponential intervals, and providing a mechanism to diff any changes.

I hate it when (news) articles change without acknowledging the changes.

Edit: come to think of it, MediaWiki + a crawler bot would be near ideal for this.

yazantapuz• 11 months ago

I use Monolith for the snapshot. It saves the whole page as a single HTML file, and it could append the timestamp to the file name.

nikeee• 11 months ago

I use my "blog" as a bookmark list. Every link is its own Markdown file with frontmatter tags. Sometimes I add more context or text, based on what I'm linking to. Some time ago I added a cron job that takes all links and looks for their archive.org entries in a similar time period and puts them in a JSON file. If the original goes down, there is always a permalink available that can be rendered instead. There is also a cron job that checks for link availability. If there is no snapshot, the link gets added to a TODO stack and add I manually create an archive.is entry later.

WorldMaker• 11 months ago

This feels like it relates to why for many Tabs seem to be the "new" bookmarks. Browser bookmark UX stagnated at some point in the 90s, but tab UX keeps improving. Especially on mobile devices, tabs keep screenshots of at least their last state. Users often have a general sense of time from their order of tabs.

Night_Thastus3• 11 months ago

Maybe I'm just getting old, but I love bookmarks. They allow me to keep a long history of things I've found that are interesting, or useful, or otherwise important. I have hundreds of bookmarks that I may not be using right now but end up being useful years later.

To me they're completely different purposes. Tabs are short term - for whatever you're working on right now. It's like a short-term cache, a worktable to keep everything in your head right now easily accessible.

Bookmarks are long term, like a filing cabinet. You may not be using it today, but you want to hold onto it for later.

If I had to use either one for the other purpose, it would suck.

chuckadams2• 11 months ago

I can't stand having more than a dozen or so tabs open, let alone hundreds. And I might not want them to keep state, but I could see how a "snapshot" bookmark could be very handy, so why not have "bookmark tab" automatically save the state? Or heck, let me drag a tab onto my bookmark bar. We already have the technology, but the UI around it has barely evolved in 20 years.

pessimizer• 11 months ago

better would be to save a snapshot of the site alongside the bookmark instead.

I've been using Zotero for that, but I again wish we had a browser maker that was concerned about users, and felt their only goal was to give the user as much control and ability as they can handle, and as much protection as they ask for.

Sadly, Zotero and a lot of other software in that line is built with no thought to speed, I think more than a few thousand entries will make it impossible to open, browse, or search. This seems to be a commonality of all of this type of software; that it isn't really meant to be used.

zaptheimpaler• 11 months ago

Good points. I use Evernote Web Clipper to save pages for a similar reason. Having the content not just the URL also means it's easily searchable.

Being able to save a page also seems to be against the interests of publishers now - they would rather you revisit the page than have a copy. Substack for example seems to try to block the web clipper because you could clip paid articles and read them after your subscription lapses.

j453• 11 months ago

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

smusamashah• 11 months ago

I have been keeping lists of urls in https://gist.github.com as markdown files. Someone even made a shortcut 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• 11 months 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".

deafpolygon2• 11 months ago

the second group is why read-it-later services exist.

iamcalledrob2• 11 months 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• 11 months 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!

iamcalledrob2• 11 months 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• 11 months ago

I have tool creating html files like this:

upon opening these htmls , the browser just redirects to the actual url.

Lammy• 11 months 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/la...

habibur• 11 months 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• 11 months 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.

chongli2• 11 months 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.

cluckindan2• 11 months 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.

conception2• 11 months ago

Firecrawl might be a tool for you

jim_lawless• 11 months 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 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.

yahoozoo2• 11 months 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• 11 months 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

yahoozoo2• 11 months ago

I’ll give it a try, thanks

rafram• 11 months 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/...

lolive• 11 months ago

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

mathiaspoint• 11 months 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.

shubham13596• 11 months 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• 11 months ago

YaCy.net does something like this AFAIR

4fips• 11 months 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• 11 months 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• 11 months 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• 11 months ago

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

swasheck• 11 months 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• 11 months ago

I want "save page to HTML" locally to friggen actually work

yepguy• 11 months 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.

conception2• 11 months 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.

RiverCrochet2• 11 months 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• 11 months ago

Then one wonders why this isn't a CSV file.

jerlendds• 11 months 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 - built with Quartz (https://quartz.jzhao.xyz/)

alabhyajindal• 11 months 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.

wakawaka282• 11 months ago

Mozilla is an ad company now, that's what.

wakawaka282• 11 months ago

This is a cool tool: 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/

godshatter• 11 months 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• 11 months 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.

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

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