bm: A console bookmark manager

I never really thought about a bookmark manager for the console; the browsers that I use these days — specifically elinks or Pale Moon — have onboard bookmarking systems already.

bm does add the ability to bounce straight to a link from the command line, something like surfraw does.

2014-07-19-6m47421-bm

Which might be preferable in some cases, rather than opening a specific browser, then working through the bookmarks to get to a site. Or using surfraw’s search tools to circumnavigate and end up in that spot.

bm can also tally some basic statistics about the number of bookmarks you have, and the popularity of particular categories. A nice touch.

Add to that the ability to sync bookmarks with Dropbox, and its ability to generate page snapshots, and bm appears to be a very good option for leaping straight from the CLI to a web page … particularly if you’re using a graphical desktop.

I had only one problem with bm as it stands now: The actual command to trigger the browser — whether through bm open or just bm — spat out a short error, which I attribute to my screwball setup. I trigger a lot of programs through specific scripts, and there’s just no way for bm to know about that.

I’m willing to give a thumbs-up to bm, even if I don’t anticipate using it much. I can see integrating it into a complete text-only machine, because it provides a good shortcut between the cursor and the browser. Enjoy, with my blessing. 😉

8 thoughts on “bm: A console bookmark manager

  1. Theodore

    Very cool idea, but it requires to reach a command called open. Which in free unixes doesn’t exist. Well… I suppose that I can grab one of the dozens of scripts in github named open…

    1. K.Mandla Post author

      That explains my error. If you find a way around that, please let me know. I’d like to see it work from start to finish. 😉

      1. Theodore

        On a system with X11, you can add this at the first line
        alias open=’xdg-open’

        This, though, is hell. It’s hell for two reasons:
        * configuration is made passing XML snippets (!) through another program, xdg-mime. Or, if I remember correctly, editing /etc/mailcap. But I’m not really sure.
        * freedesktop, which is red hat, which is satan.

        An alternative may be soap, https://github.com/FRIGN/soap
        Adding as above alias open=’soap’
        It’s suckless fashion, files are recognized through regexes specified in the header at compile time. But at the moment it’s not really safe, because it uses system for spawning external applications, thus you can escalate privileges and also call nifty things like rm -rf /. It also falls back to xdg-open every time it has to deal with unknown files. 😀

        I’m doing a long shell script for personal reasons right now, and have to work, when I found a decent shell script suitable to replace open I’ll tell you.

      2. K.Mandla Post author

        Thanks for your patience (persistence?) with that. It’s certainly not critical for me, so I hope that you’re pursuing it for your own use. … 😐

        It would be nice to see it work in full, but please don’t go too far out of your way on my account. 😉

  2. rodney

    Funny, I ended up doing my own cli bookmark manager because I couldn’t find any for Linux. An external bookmark manager it’s kind of useful if you combine it with download managers, or want to add a bunch of urls to a text to mail them, or whatever.

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