Managing bookmarks with files and windowmanager

Posted by Nico Golde in hacks & code
Thursday, February 23. 2006

I hate the bookmark option of firefox & opera. With some thousand bookmarks they are difficult to maintain and
the browser becomes slow if you want to open them. I want to have all bookmarks in a single file on which
I can operate with grep and other UNIX-tools.

For this I wrote a little shell script, get it on:
http://nion.modprobe.de/bookmark.sh

Mark an URL in your browser and then execute the script. The script uses the URL, downloads it, parses title
and writes the page title and URL into a file. It gets the URL using wmiiplumb from the
window manager wmii.

wmiiplumb only prints selected strings in X to the standard output and can be
used with every window manger, it only depends on the Xlibs.
For those who have no wmii installation get a copy of wmiiplumb on:
http://nion.modprobe.de/wmiiplumb.c

and compile it with:
gcc -L/usr/X11R6/lib -L/usr/include/lib -lX11 wmiiplumb.c

If you use wmii you can modify your ~/.wmii-$version/wmiirc
and for example add a line like:
kbind normal $MODKEY-b 'extern /home/nion/bin/bookmark.sh'

Now if you press ALT+b and an URL is selected it will grab the title and write it with URL to ~/bookmarks.txt
As a matter of course this can be used with other window mangers too.

Comments (8) - Trackback (1)

Trackbacks

Trackback specific URI for this entry

Bookmark Script
Nico's Blog post about bookmarking is pretty interesting, as I don't like the bookmark facility of Opera either. His script is pretty cool, too. After having used it for a day now, I made some changes to fit my needs better. Now it looks like this:

Weblog: Julius Plenz' Blog
Tracked: Feb 25, 20:37

Comments

Display comments as (Linear | Threaded)

quite cool. but do you know delicious?

#1 daniel (Homepage) on 2006-02-24 00:15 (Reply)

Yes for sure, I also have an account but don't want to mange all bookmarks public, I cant grep del.icio.us

Its not as flexible as a file.

#2 nion (Homepage) on 2006-02-24 00:24 (Reply)

Did you considered using the new wmiimenu to browse and match your old bookmarks?

A similiar question arises, did you considered adding a bookmark label to the wmii bar instead of defining any shortcut? We had this already back in wmii-2, just select an URL and click a bookmark label which does the rest. Much better than this is writing a general purpose plumbing script which decides what todo with a regular expression, ie ^[ht,f]tp.* -> open in browser, png$ -> wget and open in qiv, \.c$ -> wget and open in vim, etc.

See plumber(1) from plan9port for further details to get more inspirations.

Note, that wmiiplumb is called wmiipsel in recent hg tip and wmii-3+.

#3 garbeam on 2006-02-24 14:22 (Reply)

Using /tmp is asking for trouble. I suggest resorting to $HOME/tmp at least.

#4 Anonymous on 2006-02-26 15:34 (Reply)

Generally yes but I don't want to run this script an a non-trust-worthy multiuser system.

#5 nion (Homepage) on 2006-02-26 16:06 (Reply)

Sure but if you don't use best practices when you can, it'll bite you when you really need it or you simply won't about the issue at all. And there's always a difference between a secret in-house solution and something published. You can only google so much.

#6 Anonymous on 2006-02-26 16:14 (Reply)

Adapt it, if you want to use it, I am too lazy. BTW: is there a reason to drop comments anonym?

#7 nion (Homepage) on 2006-02-26 16:58 (Reply)

"is there a reason to drop comments anonym"
I am too lazy.

#8 Anonymous on 2006-02-26 17:28 (Reply)

Add Comment

Name
Email
Homepage
In reply to
Comment	Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (word), underscore are made via _word_. Standard emoticons like :-) and ;-) are converted to images. You can use [geshi lang=lang_name [,ln={y\|n}]][/geshi] tags to embed source code snippets. E-Mail addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for E-Mail notifications. To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly. Enter the string from the spam-prevention image above: You can use [geshi lang=lang_name [,ln={y\|n}]][/geshi] tags to embed source code snippets.
	Remember Information?

Managing bookmarks with files and windowmanager

nion's blog

Managing bookmarks with files and windowmanager

Calendar

Quicksearch

Support

Recent Entries

Archives

Syndicate This Blog

Categories

Tag cloud