Hacker News Reader

Comment by soulofmischief | Hacker News Reader

Bruh I've got tabs open from years ago. Hundreds across multiple VMs. I have tabs open that I migrated from my last computer. Someone please help.

View on HN

I've struggled for a while with this kind of overload and ended up with a system that makes it manageable:

1. make is as easy to 'bookmark' stuff as possible -- with a single hotkey

2. make it as easy to search over bookmarks as possible -- also ideally with a single hotkey or as quick as you could do google search

My way of achieving this is using org-mode files for 'bookmarks' [0] and using emacs/ripgrep to search over it [1]. Additional benefit of org-mode is that it's very easy to add notes, priorities, refile bookmarks, so the most interesting stuff propagates through my notes, and I don't feel bad about missing out on information that I don't have time to process because I can always quickly find it when I need.

[0] https://github.com/karlicoss/grasp#readme

[1] https://beepb00p.xyz/pkm-search.html#personal_information

I'm curious -- Roam Research appears to have won over a lot of folks with this kind of need recently. You didn't list Roam among the prior art -- do you think it's not really relevant? I can certainly see Roam eventually including cross-platform bookmarking/archiving, etc.

By the way, I think you should also take a look at Archive Box, which is very much in this direction: https://archivebox.io/

He mentions Roam twice in the article, and links to a demo with interop between Roam and his project.

You mean, I didn't include it as prior art for Promnesia or Grasp project?

For Promnesia, the goals of Roam and Promnesia are pretty different at the moment (although Roam data can be used with Promnesia, as I mentioned). In addition, I can't personally bet on a closed source tool.

For Grasp, simply because Roam wasn't known (or possibly didn't even exist!) when I wrote it. But even now that I tried Roam now, I don't think I can go back from using plaintext files, it's just so much snappier and more hackable.

Thanks, I used archivebox! Still need to set up a proper automatic archiving, and integration Promnesia with personal web archives is also in my plans!

But why bookmarks? I recognize that ultimately they are ephemeral. At some point in the next few years I'll get really drunk and just delete them all and be left with the useful bookmarks. I can't go back to bookmark overload... For the really important things, I use Zotero.

As the Buddhists say,

attachment is suffering

Reply on news.ycombinator.com