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Comment by jwells89 | Hacker News Reader

I appreciate how universal and decoupled this approach is, but it doesn’t fix my main problem with browser bookmarks which is that management overhead gets to be problematic and makes me want to not bookmark things unless there’s adequate “justification” for doing so.

This is what fuels a lot of my tab hoarding. Tabs are quicker/easier to clean up. This has led some browsers (like Arc) to blend tabs and bookmarks into the same thing, but I’m not sure how that this is the right approach either.

I’d like to explore bookmark manager design/UX in a project of my own at some point. It’s not something that’s gotten much attention in browsers in something like a couple of decades, and while plenty of external managers are out there none I’ve seen really nail it IMO.

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For me, it totally fixed the problem you mentioned: each time I find something really interesting, I drag and drop the bookmark to either a folder "MISC" (unsorted) or to a dedicated folder if it's specific to a project I'm working on.

Since the shortcut's file name contains the Page title, I can later search with my OS's search tool "curve fitting .url" => it finds the right bookmark.

If I use it in a particular project, I can copy/paste this .url file into the project folder, etc.

Having thousands of bookmarks creates no real problem: you end up with thousands of 1KB file in various folders, there is no mental burden in that: it doesn't add "weight" to the UX of a particular browser extension, since they are only files.

Drag-drop only takes 1 sec, there is no friction, no prompt.

For some time now I had a similar tab hoarding problem. My stop-gap solution is crammming a locally hosted markdown text editor in a new tab page. This way my bookmarks live as a Markdown file on my computer and I can easily add or remove links with as much additional comments as I like.

What I would like to add to it besides tons of polish is for it to be an extension that would also expose those bookmarks back to browser in form of bookmark folder syncing with the underlying markdown.

Give BrainTool a look. Its designed to address tab hoarding by making it easy to file and close out tabs and tab groups and then re-find them with search and hierarchy and notes. Associated keyboard commands make it easy to open/close and navigate tabs as a group (eg open a tabgroup with all tabs for a given topic). Everything can be synced to a plan text file. (Disclaimer, I'm the developer, but also a user!)

[0] https://braintool.org

For me Arc was exactly the wrong approach. I thought about asking for bookmarks, but switched back to Safari instead. A menu is just a better tool for keeping track of more than a few dozen things than Arc's sidebar is. If I had thought of OP's idea of files, I might have gone for that. I still might, although I think I'll look at some combination of AppleScript/KeyboardMaestro to get the job done.

I've kinda given up on my project, at least for now, but you can check out the design of it for reference. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions

0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITR1xloUslE

Management overhead must be self imposed? I have tags on some of my bookmarks and put them in folders sometimes but that's it.

Perhaps. In my case bookmarks tend to be append-only because going through and reviewing them for relevance, link rot, etc is tedious, which then makes finding bookmarks later more difficult, particularly when it’s been long enough to not remember the title/address of the bookmark. Tags can help but like folders lose effectiveness with number of bookmarks.

and if you really aren't sure you can put it in "unsorted" which is no worse than a forever tab

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