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Grimoire: Open-Source bookmark manager with extra features (github.com/goniszewski)
292 points by thunderbong on Nov 26, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 119 comments



I used to use Pocket extensively until I realized it wasn't going anywhere with features. I have since moved to Omnivore [1] and I couldn't be happier.

The devs are also ex-Pocket users and have worked hard to get feature parity and then some. There are mobile apps too for reading on the go (and work offline) which I use extensively when I am on flights. There is a graphql API and webhooks you can use for extending its functionality. Search could be a little better, but I use the labeling system which works well. I also use the logseq integration to keep a persistent log of articles I read on any given day.

[1] https://github.com/omnivore-app/omnivore


I hate to be that guy but you sound like you know your bookmarking/readlater/knowledgebase apps: What made you choose logseq over obsidian? Did you try both, or switch over at a certain point? Is starting an Obsidian knowledgebase not a thing you would to suggest to people today if they are just starting?

Thanks for any input


It would be helpful to have an overview of how to use this. I understand that I run a docker image, but what does it do? Do I have a bookmarklet? Can I import and reorg my saved bookmarks? Does it tie in with Chrome or Firefox saved bookmarks? Etc? Thanks!


Documentation is still WIP and incomplete.

As per https://grimoire.pro/docs/roadmap sharing, import, export, bookmarklet and browser extension are on the roadmap.

Offtopic: I've heard the word Grimoire only from the Black Clover anime and expected the author to be a fan of the series. Didn't know that it's such a common word, so TIL.


Derived from the word "grammar" for me.


It's french for spellbook


Yes, from grammaire/grammar -> γραμματική.


susan cooper and d&d, for me.


Touhou Project for me.


(for now?) it's just a sample webapp. Like those TO-DO lists exercises. It have a dozen random metrics dashboards about how many bookmarks you add per day etc but not a single use case is done yet.


Over 20 years ago, a small software company named Kaylon made a bookmark manager called PowerMarks. Cross browser, handled thousands of bookmarks lightning fast, pretty damned good automated indexing that could be manually supplemented or overridden just by typing in space-separated terms. Lightning fast search; the indexing very quickly got you to what you wanted.

And, local -- thank goodness. Web apps weren't really even a thing, yet.

This also meant a compact, information-rich GUI, as opposed to all the low-density web crap we're forced to put up with, these days.

It's EOL. IIRC, in part browsers closing themselves off to third party application access did them in.

Anyway, if anyone's serious about making a good personal bookmark manager, take a look at PowerMarks, if you can somehow. No one else I've seen has come close to what they had.


Hello there! I'm Robert, the creator of Grimoire.

I'm very flattered by such good observations and the warm welcome for this project. I won't be able to respond to every comment from you guys, but you bet I will read them all and take notes!

For now, Grimoire is at 1/10 of its potential, and I will work hard to make it worthy of being a good contender for your default bookmark manager. Definitely, it's missing many features, like a dedicated browser extension, import/export capabilities, and better documentation, and I'm well aware of that.

Was the launch rushed? Maybe, but I thought it would be great to hear your opinions and perhaps even appeal to some potential contributors (wink wink).

For now, I want to address the most common issues that prevent some of you from even running and testing it (clearly an oversight on my side). Then I will write a blog post on https://grimoire.pro to answer some of your questions and doubts, so (if not now, but maybe in the not-too-distant future), give it a chance.

Thank you again, and big kudos to user hunderbong for mentioning Grimoire on HN!



Having a first-class UI for bookmarks really does make a difference. I used to agree with some of the sentiments expressed in comments here - that bookmarking is a write-only activity, that just feels satisfying without actually being useful. Then I started using Zotero for my bookmarks, organizing them into collections, tagging them, adding descriptions ("Abstract"), etc., and I find that I actually go back to them a lot more, and find it really useful.

The UI browsers provide for bookmarks is pretty atrocious, and seems to have been the main reason I didn't go back to use them much - which I didn't realize until I had the idea to use Zotero as a bookmark manager. It has a lot of the features that Grimoire lists, including separate "user accounts" - I have a separate Work profile, for which I've created a desktop shortcut the same I do for Firefox [1], with its own collections and tags.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37953035


If you overlook some idiosyncrasies due to its main purpose (references), Zotero really shines as a bookmark manager. It is mature and has a lot of advanced features. The last one I discovered is enabling hierarchical tags with an addon. [1]

I still welcome any new well-built alternatives like Grimoire, and I agree with you that a first-class UI is important.

[1] https://github.com/windingwind/zotero-actions-tags


I’ve been really liking Zotero, but I don’t use it for webpage bookmarks outside of topics I’m researching. Maybe I should rethink that.


Are there any good apps that allow you to add bookmarks to zotero from a phone? For example, I would like to easily bookmark websites that I come across in a HN app. I found Zoo for Zotero but it is pretty clunky in this respect.


I love products with a bit of personality. There's tons of bookmark managers out there, but how many of those take the magical-mystical angle?

I don't have a use for Grimoire - not willing to change my bookmark workflow at this point - but you can be sure I'll remember it just based on that.


I use raindrop https://raindrop.io/ to manage my bookmarks but would switch if this actually gets browser extensions and stuff


I'm in the same boat, currently using Raindrop and looking to switch. I'm currently eyeing Linkwarden as the alternative, but I'm not sure how painless the migration will be.

https://github.com/linkwarden/linkwarden


Same. I love Raindrop, but I don't feel well about keeping my digital brain in a closed source SAAS.


Why did browsers fail when it comes to bookmark management? I mean seriously, it is arguably one of the most important features for organising your digital life and the best that a browser vendor can do is “folders”? This has always baffled me.

Who enjoys opening their bookmarks and seeing 500 links in an unordered list? Metadata has been a thing for how long now, and yet no browser that I know of has gone ahead and implemented a proper bookmark management workflow.


Classic bookmarks failed for the same reason manually curated directories lost to search engines - because the mnemonic organization doesn't work well at the required scale. Firefox has tags though, and is generally good at the classic bookmark management. You can use it to bookmark a couple hundred sites without getting lost (more or less), especially with extensions.

But what you really need is a google-like, or even better, LLM-powered search for the locally cached text of the pages you bookmark. README for this software mentions fuzzy search, not sure if it's capable enough.


> Classic bookmarks failed for the same reason manually curated directories lost to search engines - because the mnemonic organization doesn't work well at the required scale.

That's exactly it for me. Once I get a few bookmarks in the list, I'll inevitably need to organize them, but then I'll find I don't want to take the time to do that, so I just don't bother saving the bookmark.

At the end of the day, I just want to dump all my links somewhere and be able to find them again. I don't want to think about where they should go.

I built a journaling app recently [1] (the UI is similar to twitter, but for your personal thoughts), and what I've ended up doing a lot is dumping links in there. What I've found that helps is writing a quick note and adding tags, but even more than that, having a link preview generated makes it easier to remember what the link was later. (Based on screenshots, it looks like Grimoire is also generating a link preview.)

The fact that the journal UI is a "feed" also means I can browse through my history and see when I saved the link, so it has a chronological aspect to it as well. I think having all these affordances for finding things (commentary text, tags, link preview, chronology) is way more useful than hierarchical management.

[1] https://minders.ussherpress.com/


> At the end of the day, I just want to dump all my links somewhere and be able to find them again. I don't want to think about where they should go.

You might want to check out xBrowserSync. Its open source, can be self-hosted, has browser extensions and an Android app.

You don't have to organize anything. When you add bookmarks, you add them with tags and they will all go into the default bookmark folder. The beauty is that you never have to interact with that folder. Instead you use the browser extension to search for tags, name, and description. Its a very simple app that does 1 thing well.

The UI does look a little dated, but there's so little of it that it doesn't matter much.


I am doing something similar, but far simpler: I have a chat with myself in Telegram, that I can access on all my devices (Telegram has a desktop app). If I want to remember something, I just write a message to myself with the link and some keywords. Telegram search is good enough to find most stuff easily. You could also add tags with a #, but I don't even bother.


Love this concept, and the implementation looks nice and simple. Nice job.


That is exactly right.

That is why I included search on my bookmark manager. I use it daily. It contains search.

https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive


For what it's worth, I gave up on all external bookmark tools and went back to using Firefox's built-in bookmark manager. I enjoy that it's a CTRL+B away to see all my bookmarks, and that I'm able to sync it with my Firefox account.


With a s* for brains search.

It fails to search anything, even it's own folders! or parts of the url. or the tags that gets added and removed from the UI every now and then and are ignored in search.

heck there's a 18yr old bug about performance being so bad in this search that if you have over 1k bookmarks it will just hang for several seconds.

edit: that said, i also use firefox bookmarks exclusively, but just for the (only one true in the entire industry) e2e server backups. Then i just manually export them and search outside of firefox, which sucks.


That's strange. I use Firefox bookmarks pretty heavily and haven't had any of these problems. I type any bit of a URL or title for any bookmark I have in any folder, and Firefox finds it instantly every time. I think I have more than 1,000 at work (internal wikis, blahblah). A large part of my never switching to Chrome came from how much better Firefox worked for bookmarks. I use tags and ability to show tagged bookmarks from the URL bar a lot, especially. (i.e., "tag +" will show all of the bookmarks with that tag, but actually, you don't have to type the '+' unless you want to exclude matching the substring for anything but tags, because it searches tags when you start typing it also)


Agree with sibling, works on my machine, I have over 2k bookmarks in FF. Make a new profile and reimport the bookmarks and see if this all still happens.

That said, all you have is the url and description if you don't tag, so yeah, it's hard for it to be really smart about what you are looking for. As another commenter mentioned, this is an area that an AI assist tagger or search would be useful. But the industry want to drive you to a search engine so you can be data mined and shown ads.


I know I compute like a caveman at times, so a few points that might sound downright archaic:

* If I have over 1k bookmarks, that probably means it's time to go in for spring cleaning and start deleting some

* Other comments have made it apparent that you can tag bookmarks, but I personally just prepend the names of bookmarks like "javascript js - How to reverse a singly linked list GeekForGeeks" to make it easier for me to search for it in the future.

In the end, I prefer the benefit of not having an extra site/tool like Instapaper/Pocket/Shiori to have to deal with.


because it's contrary to their business model? Google wants you to search for all your queries, so it knows in real time what matters to you


I don’t think that argument makes any sense. Do people who use external bookmark managers suddenly stop using search? Also, this isn’t just about Chrome.


For many people, Google is sort of their bookmark manager.

Want to open Facebook? Search 'Facebook' and click on the link.

Want to open your bank site ? Again google bank name and click on the link.

I've see even tech people do this. The only bookmarks I've seen my colleagues use are for internal reference wikis and links which are not readily searchable.

I don't know whether this is a search or UX or people problem but the whole workflow can be improved for sure.


Browser opened to Bing? Type "Google", then type "Facebook" then click on the link. Nevermind that typing "F"+enter in the addressbar would have worked.

It's UX, but Google and Bing want it this way, so...


I've found I manually type out certain subsets of URLs where possible[0], maybe that's subconsciously associated with my impression that Google Search results have gotten worse and worse over the years.

[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/<term> and https://docs.rs/<lib> come to mind.


> I've found I manually type out certain subsets of URLs where possible

If you are doing this often enough, may be adding a custom keyword search might help. Both chrome and Firefox support it. Very useful with random JIRA and other ticket/id type navigation to skip search and jump directly to their pages.

> maybe that's subconsciously associated with my impression that Google Search results have gotten worse and worse over the years.

It has gotten worse and I don't think even Google will contest that claim.


I don't think the point is they will stop searching.

But they will search less. Which, as we have seen in the recent Google anti-trust case, is also a point Google looks at intensively when they introduce new features.


I think the idea is they don't want people to use bookmarks at all and just search every time


and Google can remember which results you want when typing keywords to url column.

it almost work like I can access all things I need by "search" with Google...until I found Google does not remember anything after two year.


My bookmarks are all well ordered, it’s just a matter of putting them in order. For documentation I even indent them like this:

  Docs (folder, expanded)
  Node
    FS
    Path
  SQLite
    Database
    Statement
    Syntax
  …
When I add a bookmark, I always select or create a folder for it. I also clear any marketing bs from the title. I believe no tech can organize bookmarks in a useful way if you don’t want to. Although I have some ideas, I bet that no fancy bookmark manager ever thought of implementing them.

Metadata has been a thing for how long now

It would be naive to assume that it will contain a systematized coherent description of a page content.


I mean, it depends on the features. Browsers have bookmarks, basic bookmarks.

Now there are bookmark tools which are archiving a page for example, have full text search. And you can add more and more features, it’s an endless game - that’s why we have that many bookmarking tools. Everybody has different priorities and needs different things.


Why wouldn't they? What other areas of UI do browsers excel at?


Chrome doesn't want you to use anything other than Google to mediate web access. Makes business sense for a search company to build a browser that is basically just a search bar.

Other browsers copied their homework. Makes less sense.


Author of [briefkasten](https://briefkastenhq.com) (https://github.com/ndom91/briefkasten) here - a veryy similar opensource/self-hostable bookmark manager based on Next.js.

Just wanted to congratulate you on this, looks great! Especially the bookmark cards and user profile page / infos. Will probably be copying some of that down the line :wink:


Zotero can save webpage snapshots. IMO, It's a good bookmark manager choice.


Will give this a try. I had given up on bookmarking and now rely on Raycast to search through my browser history, which works pretty well. But I miss the browsability, and screenshots for each page entry.

What would be awesome is if I could wget all the assets locally, and then use a local LLM to search its contents.


This looks great and I’ll definitely give it a spin when I get a chance. What I’d really like though is the ability to save the pages locally, I often revisit bookmarks from years ago only to find that the page no longer exists.


I used a Bash script for a long time that would take my new bookmarks each month and download a copy of the page. It came from an idea presented on HN, I would ack-grep it for search.

Stores using it because I use several computers and two OS now, and the utility of it is pretty low for me.

You could make a donation to Archive.org and just a script to check for an "archive-this" tag in your bookmarks, then pass those pages to archive.org??


Do you still have the script perchance?


I'll have a look, you might find the one I based it off if you search here?


Zotero has been mentioned in this thread a few times, and it has this feature. The browser extension has both "with a snapshot" and "without" options (the snapshot being your local copy), and you can choose the default and also choose for each page if you want to.

(It does have some idiosyncrasies since it's supposed to be a citation manager originally, but once you get used to the workflow it gets out of the way and works really well.)


In another note: The docker-compose file builds the frontend live on the docker container. I've built similar technology a few years ago and am totally trying to get rid of this kind-of "on-premises" build process, as imho it is WAY to fault-prone.

Interesting to see this project pull it through anyway.

They also begin with updating a lot of deb-dependencies. I imagine this to be hellishly difficult to maintain. Props for even trying!


Is there any bookmark manager that will auto reorganize your bookmarks by following a few logical rules?


Can you give an example?


Sure, All python related bookmarks go into a folder marked Python, or the system looks at your folder structure and then puts the correct bookmarks in the right folder by learning from some type of training.


While humans are still browsing (instead of agents), there is definitely a need to manage our collections better.

I worked on something in 2007 for bookmarking, too. https://vimeo.com/60251128


Maybe will no one will read my reply here, but getting downvoted for sharing stuff like this is lame. The community is awesome, the algorithm generally works, but I'm looking forward to something better when we need community.


Thanks for sharing! watching your video gave me some ideas about how my bookmarking workflow can be improved that i've never considered. I'm going to be doing some scripting this week.


After delicious and pinboard I am done with bookmarks. You know why? Because I never access them ever again and if I do, and that is ridiculously rare, finding them elsewhere in is actually easier and faster. I am all for cute little services and one app for one need, but bookmarks for me are not a need at all. Whatever little need it has are squarely served by the browser’s bookmark service and I think all of them have one these days. They’re not the easiest but it’s fine.


Fully agree, I used to be the same but if I can’t find it again through a search engine it was probably not important enough. So far I was able to track down everything I wanted.


Browser bookmarks were always ignored. Now I just save them to Pocket (getpocket.com).


I don't like any service that requires account, and is managed by a corporation.

I use self hosted solutions whenever possibile. For bookmarks I wrote a special program for myself for that, as no other program, service fully ticks all the right requirements.


I use https://www.gettoby.com/ to organise and save my bookmarks


I went from firefox to shaarli back to firefox now that sync is fairly reliable, tagged and optimized, better search is the reason I might check this out.


What bookmark manager options will catalog the bookmarks I add via Chrome's native functionality?


None that i've seen, i built myself a script that read's firefox's sqlite bookmarks database and imports new items into linkding through the API. Surprises this is not a bigger request by people, especially when it comes to importing pre existing bookmarks


nowadays I save everything in Logseq I gave up on bookmarks


Gotta love the generic LLM generated description


Yep:" casual and dial up the puns" It is funny though ;)


I feel like "docker as the preferred installation method" is a dealbreaker for me. This means that either the dependency situation is out of control, or the author just doesn't want to think about it, but either way it's a no from me...


I feel the opposite. I won't install anything except official OS packages outside Docker, if I can avoid it. Sick of polluting my filesystem with things that are hard to update, conflict with other installed packages, mess with my shell startup files, unnecessarily request root access to install, install to weird places, don't play nice with other installed packages, and on and on.

Docker is not without complications, but it alleviates far more problems than it causes. I get annoyed when something is released and doesn't have an official Dockerized version. Especially when it's a web service.

I'm a Python/Ruby/Javascript developer, and I don't want any part of those installed except on my dev machine. Unfortunately Python has infested too much of Ubuntu to avoid.


Have you given Nix a try? It's fully solved this problem for me, and it also has Dockerfile generation down great. Nothing else comes even close

What's really nice is using direnv to cd into a directory and having a flake.nix file in it which changes the entire system to what I need to do in that folder. So I don't need any of my dev environment to be system-wide, everything is per project. That alone has cut my system down to pretty much just system tools (replacements for shell commands), productivity tools (Obsidian, bitwarden, etc), and my browser. It's just so nice.


I haven't used Nix. It looks like it might be a good solution for CLIs and developer tools, but from what I know of it, it doesn't supplant Docker (or snaps or manual installation/configuration) for the kinds of things I use Docker for. Most of my personal Docker usage is for selfhosted web applications, like Nextcloud, Vaultwarden, Gitea, Drone, Wekan, Wiki.js, etc. I also now use Docker for things that I'd historically run directly on the host, like Postfix, Dovecot, Postgres, Redis, etc. I have a Proxmox VM running Docker for all my selfhosted stuff, and there's almost nothing installed outside Docker, except a few CLI clients for connecting to databases and testing things (psql, redis-cli). I run a separate VM with media servers in Docker, and another VM with my full dev environment, with Python venv, RVM, NVM, build-essential, etc. installed. Nix might be worth investigating for the dev VM, but I don't want all the selfhosted web services running outside a containerized environment (be it Docker or Kubernetes).



> What's really nice is using direnv to cd into a directory and having a flake.nix file in it which changes the entire system to what I need to do in that folder.

How cross-platform is direnv + Nix? Do flake.nix files have macOS/Linux versions?

One of the biggest advantages of using Docker images as a package format is that it's (sort of) cross-platform via Docker desktop and such on a Mac. I would prefer to use something like Nix if possible if it solves the problem a different way (being aware of platforms).


Darwin is one of the supported architectures, yes, though it is a bit of a second class citizen in the Nix ecosystem when compared to x86_64-linux.


On the other hand, I will generally only try open source web apps if they have a docker image because I know that whatever the app does will be isolated to its container and if I don't like it, I can just "docker rm" and be done with it.

Beats the tar out of the obnoxious curlpipe pattern anyway.


I think Docker is a great installation method.

- People who use Docker (Compose) can easily get up and running with a project in minutes

- People who dislike/don’t use Docker can at least use the Dockerfile and Docker Compose file as a reference to learn how to install the dependencies and the service itself.


I didn't realize this was a perspective. Yeah, that's true, the dependencies may be whack.

I kinda prefer docker installations because I don't need to guess what implicit "works on my machine" dependencies someone had, and the whole thing can be mostly stateless or the extra state is made pretty obvious.


What don't you like about a project needing dependencies?


There is a belief that risk of vulnerabilities introduced by insecure package ecosystems goes up with the number of dependencies.

For example, a study on this was recently conducted for PyPI. https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.11021


But it's inside the Docker container so even if a dependency was compromised it's in a separate userspace and chrooted so unless theres a docker zero day it should be pretty secure still it seems like.

An updated Docker environment is pretty secure I think.


This is a total nonstarter without a browser extension. I know it's in the roadmap, but I'm not willing to even look at this without the extension as the starting point. It's also the part you need to get right before anything else matters.

Right now I use xbrowsersync. It's got major problems, like sometimes (always?) breaking the ability to add bookmarks at all when sync isn't working, having to authenticate with a long-ass sync ID that you can't possibly remember, and not remembering recently-used bookmark folder order. But it works on the browsers I use and can be self-hosted. I'd love an alternative with a better UI that fully integrates with the browser (in my case ungoogled Chromium).


I haven't tried Grimoire yet but I've recently started using Shiori - https://github.com/go-shiori/shiori

A big plus is that is a single Golang binary so very easy to set up. It also has a browser extension.


Unfortunately, you can only import bookmarks from a Netscape HTML file once. There is no update.

That mens I cannot periodically import my Raindrop bookmarks to shiori. After I've done the import I can either add new bookmarks to both immediately and by hand. Or I do a total re-import in shiori, which re-archives everything (and if a page isn't retrievable anymore, that's bad luck).


It's VERY nice (and this is absolutely about to be a question in the form of a comment), the one thing that is perhaps a deal-killer for me that I'm actually unable to get a clear read on:

It appears to be impossible to have a "public" page? How it does everything else is perfect for my style, but I'd like to be able to share my link page to my students without login?


My perfect bookmark manager is Markdownload https://github.com/deathau/markdownload

Just save the complete page, only selected text or only the link to a markdown file or Obsidian. With downloaded, linked or without pictures. My OS and Obsidian can search those files, they have more (automatically added) metadata.

I can even edit them in the browser: add your thoughts, tags or change the name of the file before they are saved.

I can (automatically) do with them what ever I need. They can be used to (automatically) generate an always up to date start page or a data vault on GitHub.

My local AI assistant can parse them.

Local, versatile, permanent, flexible, cost effective, future save. No need for a bookmark manager.


This sounds like the solution I could benefit a lot as well since I am using Obsidian for almost everything.

Could you elaborate more on the "local AI assistant parsing" part please?



Aside. I completely stopped using book marks. Everything relevant to me will be an open tab, and closed once read or no longer useful; everything not immediately relevant enough to warrant an open tab will probably not be read anyway, or the link broken once I get back to it.

This has made my digital life a lot less burdensome to manage, and it also felt freeing to drop all that unorganised baggage.

To all those bookmark junkies out there - do you really actually read all that stuff, or is it just data hoarding? (And I don’t mean this in spite, I’ve hoarded lots of data at one point or another myself :-))


I did not stop bookmarking, I just radically simplified my routine. No (sub)folders, no system, just bookmark everything into one folder, lightly sprinkled with some tags from the top of my head.

Since I never know what I will actually find useful at a later time, I spend no energy organizing them. But having a simple record of my (want to) reads is super useful whenever my brain vaguely remember having seen or read something that comes up in a conversion/project, but not where and the exact name. Since I use broad on-the-top-of-my-head tags, I usually find what I'm looking for within a few seconds.

This strategy has lowered my barrier to bookmark something significantly, and reduced the mental overhead to almost zero.

Decades of overthinking my bookmarking habits and this has been by far the most useful system!


I use the same approach, which works great for me.


The problem is when I suddenly remember something I saw a month ago that is now relevant and I can't find it anymore. That's why I preemptively bookmark interesting stuff


This. I also edit the bookmark title to include a bunch of keywords. Finding an article I have only a vague recollection of on the wide web can be hard, but finding it in my bookmarks is easy.

I was a big del.icio.us user back in the day, maybe self hosting something like the OP is the way to go.


> This.

...

Isn't submitting a response enough to convince the rest of us plebs that you agree or have other strong feelings about the parent comment?

Chances are good that, unless you're James Joyce, folks will read through the entirety of your statement to draw inflection from what you've conveyed.

When you don't agree with the parent comment, have you kicked things off with, "Not this" or, more succinctly, "!This" before making your counterpoint?


I understand “This” below a comment as a sort of a sign that it messages exactly what the replying person wanted to say. Akin to inheritance. If you just reply with an extension, it may not be as clear that you fully support it.


have you never heard or read someone start a reply with “i agree” or “i disagree”? in any case, what an awfully off-topic, pedantic thing to get bent out of shape about.


this isn't it


Self hosting only makes sense to me if the bookmark search is integrated into the address bar?


In that case I search my browsing history or re-navigate to that thing with a search engine.


History search is not an option when my browser is mostly in private window.

For me, Google has a mind of its own and has not been reliable in giving out related links even when I search with the exact page title from memory. Happened a lot with stackoverflow type sites.

I use Firefox bookmarks and think it has a reasonably good bookmark manager with support for tags and custom keyword searches etc.

Tip: In Firefox you can search bookmarks directly by prefixing searches with a * . It can even search bookmark tags.


In Chrome you can search bookmarks too. Start typing @bookmarks and it autocompletes search on your bookmarks. Same with @tabs to search through open tabs.


Edge has helpfully copied Firefox's "awesome bar" in doing bookmark search and history search with * and ^, respectively.

Sadly Edge doesn't do tags, I initiate them by appending keywords to the bookmark name.

(I have to use Edge at work.)


Having bad memory is a nice solution to this. You just don’t remember, so there’s no problem.


I bookmark things in pinboard that I may wish to find again, at some other point in time... I am helping my future self, and I appreciate that by paying pinboard to ensure a backup of the page is saved. I search the bookmarks every week or two, and I frequently search back years to "I recall a passage, but now want to read the full article again or share it with someone"... this works even when the site has long-ceased to exist because of the backup scraped at the time. I have bookmarks going back to the mid-1990s, and I do periodically (every year or two) look at which still work and which have fallen by the wayside for which I have no saved page — and I delete those.

Additionally I have this page https://david.kitchen/bookmarks/ which is my browser home page in all browsers, and is another form of a bookmark collection, and this is how I mostly interact... where pinboard is long-term storage of bookmarks, anything I interact with regularly enough is on this page. I update this whenever I find myself returning to the same thing for more than a few weeks.

I don't feel like I carry any baggage, the opposite in fact... I feel like this clears the mind of the responsibility to remember as this is mostly long-term memory and short-term convenience.

I also keep my browsers in permanent incognito mode with NoScript... so tab-city is not a thing I've ever done, every session is a blank session. I view bookmarks like data on a computer... it should be extremely portable across devices and OSs, and so bookmarks should transcend the device, a specific browser, and be available everywhere.


Have you tried the arc browser? It embraces having lots of open tabs and organize them as you wish (or not) https://arc.net/


I updated their slogan just now:

"Firefox is the Chrome replacement I've already been using."


I mostly use bookmarks as "speeddials" for frequently visited websites in my browsers bookmark bar. Just the icons, no text so it is fairly clean as well.

I then keep one directory for stuff that is on my short term future "todo" list. For example, when I am deciding on buying a product I might have multiple shop listings there.

So to your statement here

> To all those bookmark junkies out there

My response is that there is a middle ground ;)


I’m using only browser bookmarks, and only the always visible bookmark bar. I tried a few others, but the friction, any friction, is too much for me to consistently use them. And yeah, I use bookmarks a lot. For a few different purposes.

First off, I almost never encounter dead links. That’s an absolute rarity and I can’t even remember when that last happened. That’s more for reddit/SO links.

Some that I have as favicon only for regularly visited sites, but not regularly enough to have them as pinned tab.

Following those, I have temporary bookmarks. That’s currently fantastic fiction as a reminder to myself to use it, that will probably be gone next year as I got used to using it.

Then, folders. First is cooking stuff, from before I used a recipe manager. That’s around 100 bookmarks there that are categorized into subfolders.

Music. Mostly YT vids that are not on Bandcamp where I have a wishlist. Usually use those for songrequests on twitch.

Next is the voice folder, a long-term project of replacing alexa with something fully local, everything I researched or even just hardware sources.

Sesotho, for information for learning the language. Only relevant when I’m actually studying something new there.

3 gaming folders for build inspiration from tabletop guides (WotR, Solasta, BG3; videogame guides are way too minmaxy for me)

Following those are random links. I’m now roughly at 1/3rd to 1/2 of my window size, everything that follows is currently relevant stuff that I still want to lookup or make use of. New ones get added to the left. Once something falls into the overflow area, it’s probably irrelevant, but often I do get back to those links before that happens.

So yeah, I love bookmarks.


For me it's now a tree of org mode files that quote that actual relevant part of the page, and a link back to the original.

But yes, over two and a half decades of storing URLs with little context other than their place in a hierarchy of topics has led me to the conclusion that data on the internet is ephemeral. If you want to save it, copy it.


I bookmark and tag a lot of stuff. It's come in handy multiple times.

Even stuff I've read, if I remotely think I'll want to see it again, I bookmark and tag.

I never manually go through my bookmarks, only search them. But they are a pointer back in history for me.


Yes, but now you can run into risk of becoming 1000-tabs-open junkie like me :-)

Off-topic, but given how people try to apply LLMs to everything right now, I am surprised there is no extension or something similar to help manage bookmarked and open tabs.



For me the trick was to no hoard random bookmarks. I still keep a short list of bookmarks that I visit often of very likely to re-visit.

Anything else is purged.


The person who created the Custom GPT with same name will be pissed


For users like me, finding a server like this is the easy part, it's just a glorified CRUD for links. Well-working, up to date extensions and mobile app are all that matter and where most such projects (like wallabag) fail. I just want a selfhosted Pocket with a similar quality UX.




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