Keeping my bookmarks in a plaintext file

‹‹ 2024-04-17 ››

For the longest time I didn't organize my bookmarks at all. Links were either in an unorganized folder with various miscellaneous neighbors or inside a "Imported from Firefox" folder nested inside "Imported from Chrome" (repeat however many times I changed browsers in my life).

Worse than that, because I didn't get much use out of bookmarks I never got into the habit of bookmarking things a lot, which reinforces the whole not getting much use out of them.

At some point, however, I found vimwiki and got more invested in the way I take notes. I've since moved to mkdnflow, but these tools serve the same purpose: they allow me to keep a local, easily accessible knowledge base that's searchable, easy to backup, stored in a very commonly accepted format! Plus, I can bind a key to open it on $EDITOR.

But the purpose of this post isn't to explain note-taking systems in general, you can Google "Zettelkasten" or watch Hack your brain with Obsidian.md for that, maybe even Hack Your Brain With Elaborate Coping Mechanisms while you're at it -- it's about more than just notes, but it'll be worth it I promise. The purpose of this post is to say why I now keep my bookmarks in said note-taking system, in a list inside a markdown file.

Sure, the first thing I said is that "I didn't organize my bookmarks" and while throwing every article or youtube video I have a slight chance of wanting to revisit later isn't exactly organized, a list of links in chronological order that I can easily Ctrl+F if needed actually works quite well! All the other benefits of a local file that's not inside a browser apply here too, making it easy to backup and avoding the need to export/import them. Plus -- and that's a really nice plus -- I can run a fuzzy finder in the file to find things and I find that works much better than trying to find bookmarks elsewhere. Keybinds help in making it easy to open the file to add a new link, but obviously pressing Ctrl+D is easier, so I'll at least concede that point to the browsers.

If I do regret choosing this format one day, markdown is just so simple I could hack a quick script to convert it to another format and call it a day. Will I regret it? Only time will tell. Maybe I'll edit this post 2 years from now and report back.