Bookmarks are a major pillar of any knowledge-management strategy.

Bookmarks are the foundation of the World Wide Web and personal bookmark management should be regarded as a solved problem these days, right?

Truth is, I used to struggle a lot with bookmarks.

My requirements:

• I want to own my bookmarks. They reflect a carefully curated list of knowledge and expertise which I have honed over years. I maintain this list and keep it up-to-date. I do not want them to live in any walled garden or cloud service.
• I want them to be platform agnostic.
• I need them to be at my fingertip wherever I am currently working, no matter where, on what device…
• I need them searchable with respect to various categories and keywords. Searchability is the whole point of knowledge management, so this one is very important.

Well, there are myriads of bookmark managers out there, so just pick one, right?

However, bookmark managers tend to either suck you into a walled garden, or are not cross-platform or are blocked by some old-fashioned IT department for “security reasons”.

So I tried a lot of the existing solutions in order to have well maintained and synchronized bookmarks on all my devices.

Nothing worked for me, so eventually I wrote twbm.

twbm is heavily inspired by buku.

It allows managing bookmarks on the command line in a sqlite database via Github. Since I am living at the command line, opening a URL just by hitting a key is beautiful.

Over the time I found little griefs with buku so eventually I decided to fix things for me.

First things first: buku is great, it has a big community, and it is battle tested. I am grateful to jarun for providing and maintaining this useful tool.

However, I wanted a few things added or changed.

My wishlist

• better full-text search
• check tags for consistency when adding new bookmark
• alphabetical ordering of deep search results
• no tools like bukuserver, only CLI
• support piping of search results to downstream consumers
• find old/obsolete bookmarks

The UI is a matter of taste, but sometimes I struggled with buku’s parameter resolution and syntax.

Implementation

This is an extension of the idea of buku built on top of a few state-of-the python libraries for maintainability, enriched by the features I was missing.

The result twbm is still 100% buku compatible. Switching back and forth between twbm and buku is easily possible:

# upgrade existing buku database to twbm: 
twbm-upgrade-db.sh buku.db twbm.db

# downgrade twbm database back to buku:
twbm-downgrade-db.sh twbm.db buku.db

These commands are non-destructive, so no data will be lost.

The solution provides decent full text search based on sqlite’s FTS5.

Search Examples

# FTS examples (https://www.sqlite.org/fts5.htm)
twbm search 'security "single-page"'
twbm search '"https://securit" *'
twbm search '^security'
twbm search 'postgres OR sqlite'
twbm search 'security NOT keycloak'

# FTS combined with tag filtering
twbm search -t tag1,tag2 -n notag1 <searchquery>

# Match exact taglist
twbm search -e tag1,tag2

# Search -> select interactively -> pipe bookmark ids downstream for processing, e.g. adding tag 'x'
twbm search xxxxx | twbm update -t x

# Search by any tag and sort by bookmark age ascending
twbm search -T tag1,tag2 -O

Summary

I arrived at a point now where I truly regard bookmark management as solved for me.

• All tasks can be accomplished via command line and search is decent.
• Synchronization and versioning via git.
• No limitations via weird policies of IT departments.

Again, thanks buku for the inspiration.