Any offline bookmark managers (or similar software) you'd recommend? (simple and open source preferred!)
I have way too many bookmarks. Currently, I use firefox's bookmark manager to categorize my bookmarks within folders, and to assign tags. However, I'm looking for alternate solutions. I am not a fan of online services where you need an account, personally. Curious if anyone knows of any offline software to store your bookmarks, that you have found useful?
Tbh I was thinking of just throwing together some web page that I can just host myself, but I don't want to reinvent the wheel. That said, I hate depending on more and more software, as none of this stuff lasts forever.
I'm open to other software that could be used for this purpose, not just something devoted to storing bookmarks. Ideally something that is simple, and just allows you to visually categorize into folders. Tags are a huge plus.
In case useful to anyone, I have tried out Zotero previously. It's free and offline. I think it's geared more for saving research, but I was using it to categorize bookmarks. I'll have to give it another spin.
I remember making an account on their website, but not certain if the account was required to use the software or not (I don't think it is).
I also came to recommend Zotero.
You don't need an account but if you have one you can sync your library to their servers so you can access it on the web interface. You can run your own sync server as well.
One thing I really like about Zotero is that it also saves and syncs attachments, and it can autoresolve PDFs. So I can find an article, add to Zotero via Firefox plugin, and then it saves a copy of the PDF so I have the full article to read on my phone.
The Better BibTeX plugin is great as well. It auto exports a BibTeX file of my entire library so I can cite anything anytime I want.
Yeah, Zotero seems to have a lot of functionality I am yet to discover. Any other favorite plugins you might recommend?
It depends what you are looking for. A great place to start is the bookmarking section of awesome-selfhosted.
If you want pure bookmark syncing, there's Xbookmarksync.
I personally use Shiori because I wanted something that would take snapshots but was a smaller application. I don't actually use it all that much so smaller size was beneficial for me.
If you want full text search you may want to check out Wallabag or Briefkasten.
That first github link is a goldmine, never came across that before! Thanks a ton!
Does Xbookmarksync allow for syncing to a file path and then syncing to other devices via Syncthing? I'm looking for a truly server-free solution to bookmark syncing
I've written about this a lot before (both in articles and in my comment history here on Tildes), but my advice in general comes down to "stop bookmarking URLs" and "start keeping highlights".
After a certain point, you forget why you bookmarked something, and the data just isn't there to allow you to effectively search URL bookmarks (or aid rediscovery, if that is important to you).
This is absolutely do-able and imo is this one of the areas where you should reinvent the wheel.
I went down this path because the experience of Pinboard, Readwise, Instapaper just felt wrong, and I ended up creating something that finally feels right for me.
When it comes to personal knowledge management, building something that feels right for you in my experience has been worth the effort and paid off tenfold within a few years.
Crap. Don't give me any ideas to start another project for myself! But yeah, I actually agree here. Sometimes there's so many great options, but none of them are just quite... right. When it comes to stuff like this, it can be so personal, so it makes sense why it might be a useful situation to just make your own thing. I think I have gone done this road so many times though with various things, that I am cautious now to do my research first. More than once I've reinvented something for myself, only to realize it actually did exist, and I was just too lazy to find it! So I do a little digging first, to try and save my time.
That said, the great thing about your own tool is that you don't have to worry about it becoming obsolete. It's a wonderful peace of mind :)
Are there any features you specifically need for it being bookmarks as opposed to any other kind of text? Because my instinct is that a note-keeping application like Joplin could work, with the URL in the body of a note and the tagging and folder structure applied to the note.
If you can find something that does even the first two, I'm very interested.
I can't think of anything that would need to make it "bookmark" specific. Any text should be fine. I just want to be able to organize by folder and tag things. I will have to take a look at Joplin, a couple of you mentioned it.
While you're looking at Joplin, check out Obsidian too.
tl;dr: Joplin is open source, stores data in a binary format (documented, but not trivial to access). Obsidian is closed source, but with a HUGE community, the "database" is just markdown files and attachments in a directory.
I personally chose Obsidian because I can use simple scripts and programs to edit the data outside of Obsidian if I need to or use the data I created in obsidian for other purposes.
It wouldn't actually be too difficult to create a script that takes all notes in Obsidian with a specific tag and fetches the open graph metadata for any links in there and modifies the content appropriately... 🤔 brb, trying that now :D
I've seen Obsidian recommended several times on tildes so far for various things. You guys are getting me much more interested in markdown than I was previously, and so far, well damn I like it.
Markdown isn't perfect, but especially with front-matter it's a really good format for storing textual data and links.
Plus the fact that it's just normal text makes it not scary to edit it using whatever you're comfortable with and move the files around freely.
Keepass(xc) might suit your need. It has folder and hierarchy and recently added support for tagging. Only downside I see would be unnecessarily huge file due to encryption and slower opening speed depending on the complexity of the algorithm. Have you ever tried it?
Interestingly, I'd seen a few people mentioning they use password managers as bookmark managers. I've seen folks saying the use bitwarden as well. Might be an interesting way to do this. I have never tried myself. I honestly struggled with keepass in the past, but I think it is worth another go.
I'm not saying it's the most robust system out there, but I just use my note taking application, currently Joplin.
Pages that I just want to read or look into later go into my "TMP" folder. Pages that are related to research in a specific topic go into that topic's own notebook, if such exists. Other random bookmarks I put to my generic "Bookmarks" notebook. Maybe tagged. There's also a Joplin Web Clipper extension for Firefox.
Joplin is free and open source, although I pay for their cloud service, both to support the project and because I never got the syncing to work properly through Dropbox or my WebDAV server, and I like to have access to my notes on all of my computers and mobile devices.
Very cool. Never heard of Joplin until now. Will have to check this out. I tend to take my notes on just tons of random .txt files, that I organize within folders on my OS. It has worked for me, but I admit it's as bare bones as possible, and can easily get messy. Never thought of using something like this as a bookmark manager. Good idea.
Small additional note without derailing this into a "my notes app is better than yours" war: also look into Obsidian, it's like Joplin on crack (but can also be used 1:1 like Joplin if you don't need these features, but you have the option at any point). It has a huuuuge community and ecosystem with a thousand different plugins if you need them. I've looked into the Joplin code on GitHub a few times and more than once I was scratching my head thinking: wtf they were doing there :D And I like and used Joplin for like 2-3 years :)
A bit more on topic: In case you just use your bookmarks as a dump for "want to read later", then also check out the self-hosted solution wallabag. I personally haven't used it, but seen people in the self-hosted ecosystem talk about it many times (If you don't want to self host it also has a very cheap hosted option). It also comes with Firefox and Chrome plugins to one click pages into your wallabag (and add tags before adding them, etc.).
For Joplin vs Obsidian, if all you need and want are the simple features, Joplin does it in a much more user-friendly way in my opinion. I made the switch to Obsidian despite having no interest in the extras and it still annoys me having tags as part of the note and "embedded" media being manually linked from another folder.
Fair enough, the "tags" are a core plugin that can be disabled, but I'm not fully sure to what extent. Though Joplin also has tags (slightly differently implemented, though). What bothers me most about Joplin: the file structure on your actual drive. In Obsidian it's actually 1:1 the same structure with folders and .md files. That's sadly not the case with Joplin. They're in a sqlite DB and you need to export them and resources (like attachments) are stored flat in a folder.
Of course, that's not really a problem if you plan to always stay with Joplin.
Oh I want tags, that's the problem. In Joplin they're attached to the note but not in the body, in Obsidian they're in with the note text. Which makes them less portable in Joplin but as you say isn't a problem if you plan to stay with it.
In Obsidian you can attach tags to a note via a front matter. Maybe that's what you mean :D I'm sure there are also plugins to extend on it.
Just want to say that I love reading such discussions haha. It really brings out the passion in people. :)
I also would like to have something similar. My "only" requirement is that it has full text search. I know Pocket has this behind a paid subscription, but it only works online, as far as I know.
It would be nice to have some cross platform solution that also supports full text search.
Have you ever exported your bookmarks as an HTML file? Do that before you try anything more complex.
You can export bookmarks as an html file (here is how.
That HTML file can be stored on any local file system, uploaded to anything that can host html (like github), viewed by any browser, added as a bookmark into any browser and ingested into anything that imports html links.
Basically, export the bookmarks, add a "bookmark" to the new bookmarks.html file, click the "bookmark" and use the browsers find function to search your old bookmarks. The downside is it is read only, and the tags are hidden.
Glad you brought this up, because I did finally do that after posting this thread, and it's actually very useful. I was able to import into zotero from this, and the html file in itself is useful on its own. It appears firefox has a way to export as json as well, if memory serves me.
Same!
I use the self-hosted LinkAce because it was easy to set up and will run on any free/common webhost, a small project so good performance and easy to modify myself, and free as in freedom. So it's not offline as you requested in the title, but the data is still yours and you can access it on your phone, which was a criterion for me.
I use tags such as
books(ideas for books to read) or topics I'm interested in such asastronomy. I also use a list calledtodowhich I abuse as a cross-device to-do list.https://linkace.org - disclosure: I've contributed a few minor fixes but otherwise have no involvement (don't personally know the owner/author)
This looks fantastic and very much the sort of thing I'm looking for. thanks so much! will give this a try!
I don't use bookmarks at all but I feel very organized.
You might consider finding specific software for different types of websites that you are interested in.
Personally, I don't use RSS except to interface with content downloading tools like yt-dlp. For websites that I want to visit on a regular schedule (eg. daily tildes.net) I wrote a script which uses a simple SQLITE database to keep track of tabs to open per day:
library tabs is a way to organize your visits to URLs that you want to remember every once in a while.
The main benefit of tabs is that you can have a large amount of tabs saved (say 500 monthly tabs) and only the smallest amount of tabs to satisfy that goal (500/30) tabs will open each day. 17 tabs per day seems manageable--500 all at once does not.
The use-case of tabs are websites that you know are going to change: subreddits, games, or tools that you want to use for a few minutes daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly.
library tabs is meant to run once per day. Here is how you would configure it with crontab:
edit:
I said I don't use bookmarks but that is somewhat untrue: I do save URLs which I either have not started reading or don't have the time to open (ie. I encounter a list of URLs which seem like high quality recommendations).
I have a line-delimited file for unread tabs and I copy and paste tabs there. I automate that 7 tabs are opened from that file. It is working well so far and I'm on track to reach tab zero in about ten years.
To batch similar reads together I have another script which has this line to sort the URLs by text similarity every month (this also helps to group Wayback machine URLs and their original URLs close together):
I also have two specific files for music and movie recommendations which I treat in a similar way.
edit2:
Here are some links that might be relevant to you but I haven't used them. They are tangentially interesting to me but I have not found a need to investigate them enough to start using them:
Damn. I really need that library tabs thing. I have... too many tabs... always. Yeah, it's an ongoing problem in my life. That's actually what finally got me to start using bookmarks. Even with that though, my tabs are still out of control.
Just out of curiosity - what do you do for pages you find that are just like "i love it". Doesn't really fit into a category. For example, you just find a nice image, or a funny website, or just a cool article. Not necessarily something you want to revisit tomorrow or next week, but more "five years later I'm going to remember I saw that cool picture of a bird and I will never find it again so I'm gonna save it now." Is this the sort of thing you would use library tabs for? You have clearly put a ton of thought into this, and it makes me realize I need to up my game here!
It's part of xk library
library tabsdoesn't set out to solve this problem specifically. I think most of my tabs have been one-off tabs. So for me the problem of too many tabs is solved by keeping a plain text file and saving URLs to there instead of opening 30+ tabs.But
library clustersortcan help move similar tabs closer together (by sorting lines of text). The benefit of this is less information fatigue and it makes it faster for me to close redundant tabsIf it's an image I would save the image. I recommend creating a shallow folder system (ie. Fewer than 10 or 20 folders and don't make subfolders but instead rename the files by controlled vocabulary).
There's no guarantee that the image will still be accessable on the same URL after 5 years. To prove the point: I have a list of 25 million imgur URLs from 2008 to now and over 70% of them are 404 already.
The same is true for text articles or websites. Link rot probably follows a power law. To save websites there are many tools like SingleFile or wget. But if you want to make a curated archive of text I would copy and paste text into markdown. The setup doesn't need to be complicated and the simple solutions are the easiest to keep using over decades and they transfer easily from old to new computer systems.
If you save locally then you can use many different software for rediscovering the media (image or text, or...). If you want to enjoy a random image every five years you can use Unix or PowerShell tools. But some of the core code in Library is written for different ways of sorting and consuming media:
library fsaddwill scan your filesystem (extracting metadata with various tools like ffmpeg, ExifTool, textract) and create a SQLITE database which can then be used with various other CLI commands to help organize and consume large collections of media.One of those subcommands is
library viewwhich can be used with an image collection database created bylibrary fsadd --image. Likewiselibrary readandlibrary fsadd --text. Note that I haven't really tested both these options very heavily. I mostly consume video and audio (library watch,library listen). So open a ticket if things go wrong (the URL for opening a ticket is shown if you just typelibrary).library tabscould be used for local media (or if it doesn't work, open a ticket) but the main problem is that your number of "core memories" could be bigger than you have time for in a single day of history reflection. For example, if you have 10,000 memes you want to remember every five years you would be required to open 5 images every day for the code to work.I guess that doesn't seem like too many actually so it could work. My main point is that
library tabsis written for required repetition and the default Library mechanism (used inlibrary watch, etc) is a mechanism that assumes endless media and it will only show you something you saw before after you've consumed everything (unless you do something likelibrary view -w 'play_count>=1'). I recommend usinglibrary viewand adding that where clause when you want to visit the past. It's more flexibleFor something that's not specific to bookmarks, I'd recommend FSNotes, a plain text notes app:
https://fsnot.es/
ah now this seems to be for mac, which I do not have. But that's a shame because it looks cool. The UI appears quite beautiful as well. I wonder if there's something like this for windows, because I could get a lot of use out of this just as a note taking application. I still just do random .txt files ...
Oh ok, you might like Obsidian:
https://obsidian.md/
Similar to FSNotes, you can use plain text files with it. And it has built-in back-linking.
I use Bibsonomy, "the blue social bookmark and publication sharing system", which I found after repeated searches for an alternative tagged bookmark manager following the demise of delicio.us several years ago.
It has browser extensions for buttons to easily add and manage bookmarks for web pages.
BibSonomy is offered by the KDE group of the University of Kassel, the DMIR group of the University of Würzburg, and the L3S Research Center, Germany. Its open source repository is at bibsonomy.bitbucket.io.
Hey this looks really cool! I would love to hear your thoughts on what you've found most useful about this that you haven't found in other places. For example, is it the social aspect? (being able to easily share stuff, because yeah clearly that isn't built into something like firefox bookmark manager.) Would love to hear your thoughts (but no pressure).
What's most useful to me is the editable metadata, such as a link description and, especially, tagging. Tags can also be hierarchically organized and are rendered in a tag cloud. I don't personally care so much about the social aspect or the privacy settings, although I know these are important for others.