Bookmark Manager

or bm for short because who doesn't like a good bm...

Description

The purpose of this project is to create a cross-platform, CLI based, web bookmark manager in Rust that saves bookmarks to a flat file (CSV).

This has several advantages:

• It's not tied to any specific browser, so it is easier to switch back and forth between Firefox and Chrome over the years.
• Flat files are forever. Even if the tools built around them become deprecated so there is no concern of every losing data.
• Flat files play nicely with Git/SCM.

The intention is that the CSV file is stored in Git/SCM, and it can be synced between devices using Git/SCM.

Details

The "CSV" file is actually | separated with 3 columns: URL, DESCRIPTION, and TAGS. The TAGS column contains a comma separated list.

Setup/Install

# If not using the --no-commit option, it will use the default user/email for creating commits when new bookmarks are added
git config --global user.name <name>
git config --global user.email <email>

Requires installing Rust.

# Installs to ~/.cargo/bin which should be in your path if you installed Rust according to the standard instructions.
cargo install --path .

Usage

Indicate where the application should look for the CSV file either with the BOOKMARK_MANAGER_CSV environmental variable.

# In .bashrc
export BOOKMARK_MANAGER_CSV=<path>

or

# When running the application
BOOKMARK_MANAGER_CSV=<path> bm ...

The CSV will be created if it does not exist at the given path.

Help

bm help

Add bookmark

bm help add
bm add <URL> <DESCRIPTION>
bm a <URL> <DESCRIPTION>

# URLs are validated and must begin with http(s)
bm a https://www.google.com "Google search engine" -t Search --tag Google
bm add https://www.facebook.com "Time sink"

# By default, if BOOKMARK_MANAGER_CSV is in a git repo. A commit will be made after adding a new bookmark. --no-commit to turn off
bm add https://github.com "Source code" --no-commit

Search bookmark

bm help add
bm search <REGEX>
bm s <REGEX>

# Search with only regex, no tags
# The regex is case insensitive
bm search "search engine"

# Tags are like "and" queries
# Tags are case insensitive
bm s google --tag Search

# Search with only tags, no regex
bm s -t Search

On macOS, hold down the command key and double-click on the URL to open it in your default browser.

Tags

Tags are just a way to organize bookmarks. Like labels in Gmail.

bm help tags

# List all tags sorted one per line
# If there are multiple of the same tag with different casing, they will be comma separated on the same line
bm tags
bm t

# Look for a specific tag
bm t |grep "query"

Bash Completions

In your bashrc file, source tool/bm_completions.bash to get tab completions for tabs.

If fzf is installed, tags can also be completed using standard fzf trigger tab completion.

# Example of normal tab completion
bm s -t <tab>

# Example searching for a tag using fzf (Assuming $FZF_COMPLETION_TRIGGER is **)
bm s -t **<tab>

Migrating from browser based bookmark managers

Instructions on how to convert your existing bookmarks.

Chrome

From a Chrome HTML export file:

# Folders will be turned into tags
perl -lne 'BEGIN{my @tags=(); print "URL|DESCRIPTION|TAGS"} if (/HREF="([^"]*)"[^>]*>([^<]*)</) {my $url=$1; $url =~ s/\|/%7C/g; my $d=$2; $d =~ s/\|/-/g; print "$url|$d|".join(",", @tags) }; push(@tags, $1) if />([^<]*)<\/H3/; pop(@tags) if /<\/DL>/' 2021_07_22_Chrome.html > bookmarks.csv

Development

Requires installing Rust.

Test

# Lint
cargo clippy --all-targets --all-features -- -D warnings
# Runs unit and integration tests
cargo test

Build

Development Build

cargo build

Release Build

All these steps need to pass otherwise the CI build will fail.

# To keep a clean build, fail on any compiler warnings, not just errors
cargo clippy --workspace --all-targets --all-features -- --deny warnings
cargo test
cargo fmt
cargo build --release

Run from source

cargo run -- add https://www.google.com "Google search engine" -t Search

Reference

• Command line apps in Rust