I employ two distinct ways of managing my bookmarks. The first is reserved for my essential/active/frequent (or whatever one might call these) bookmarks and the second is used for–well, you may guess. Lets start with the first class.
This method is rather primitive but works exceptionally well. You just keep your bookmarks (i.e. links) in a plain textfile. However, without the second component, ingredient you could say, you might, as I expect, be rather distrustful regarding the benefits of such a method.
Ofc you don’t just store your bookmarks in a textfile and then manually retrieve them when needed. I would not write this post to call attention to such a method so do not worry.
Furthermore, it should be obious that I did not come up with this myself but instead adapted it from Luke Smith though I doubt that he was the first to come up with it.
Well, assuming you haven’t stopped reading to watch Luke Smith’s video instead, you might be wondering what the secret ingredient is. It is a little (15.94 KB download) but amazing program called dmenu. It “is a dynamic menu for X1, originally designed for dwm. It manages large numbers of user-defined menu items efficiently” or to use archLinux.org’s slightly less minimal explanation “dmenu is a fast and lightweight dynamic menu for X1. It reads arbitrary text from stdin, and creates a menu with one item for each line. The user can then select an item, through the arrow keys [crtl+n/p work as well] or typing a part of the name, and the line is printed to stdout. dmenu_run is a wrapper that ships with the dmenu distribution that allows its use as an application launcher”.
For the purposes of this post the first part of dmenu’s functionality is more important while most people, I reckon, know it for the second, i.e., as an application launcher (esp. for window managers).
bindsym $mod+i exec --no-startup-id sh -c 'xdotool type "$(grep -v "^#" ~/mega/bookmarks/bookmarks | dmenu -i -l 50 | cut -f2)"'
So, what are thea actual benefits I experience by doing this?
The main benefit, I would say is the ease of migrating to a new browser. What do I have to do to continue using my bookmarks? Nothing. Another big plus is that this works not only as bookmark for browser but for anything really. I can use it in the terminal (sure, there are aliases &c. and I do not actually use it in the terminal but I could) or I can save a system prompt for LLMs I particulary like; I also experience no migration barriers here then when migrating to another LLM provider. It’s is a regular textfile. That’s it; hence it is of rather small size which, I will admit, is no game changer but attractive nonetheless. I will further admit that a comphrensive setup requires some initial effort (though not much; especially in the times of LLMs) but from that point onward you are good to go forever basically. Depending on your setup it will get setup automatically on a new device as well. Moreover, this requires not account anywhere whatsoever.
Tbf, I have no clue if this works on Windows. Well, it certainly does not with dmenu and even if it works it will probably be a hassle to set up.
You can obviously extend this even further by adding more common bookmarking tool functionalities like, for example, being able to automatically add the current url to the bookmark file (I do not do this bc I have no need. Doing it manually keeps me kind of mindful of not filling up my bookmarks).
Raindrop, dont know what much to say about this other than it is open source which, btw. dmenu is as well ofc.