Browser Independence

Here's what I'm currently liking for me:

• Org-Mode
• Orgzly Revived
• Syncthing
• Syncthing-Fork for Android

This is an un-apologetically emacs-centric setup. If you want something similar without emacs, you might be able to do something with obsidian.

I keep my bookmarks in a collection of org-mode files. When I'm on a computer with a keyboard, I use emacs to browse, search, and edit them. I can bookmark a web-page with one click from Firefox ² using the Org Protocol as described in the official manual here.

When I'm on my android phone, I use orgzly-revived to browse, search, and edit my bookmarks. I can bookmark a webpage from Firefox ³ by using the android "Share" feature, and choosing to share with Orgzly. This also works for most social media clients, news apps, video apps, etc.

Let me say that last bit again: Because I'm using a specialist bookmark-manager, I get a unified bookmark-interface into all the content I consume on my phone. I'm not tied in to a million different providers' slightly different implementations of "bookmarking" on their particular service.

I keep my bookmarks synchronised between my various devices using Syncthing.⁴

On android, I use "Syncthing-Fork", which I believe is where the community rallied round when the maintainer of the original Syncthing android app was no-longer willing or able to keep up with some demands from the Google Play service.

Both Orgzly Revived and Syncthing Fork are available on F-Droid, for folks who like that sort of thing.

Mozilla have official docs on how to export your bookmarks as an HTML file.⁵

Once you've followed those steps, you'll find yourself with a large HTML file. This file is essentially one huge nested definition-list <DL>, with mostly one line per-bookmark and the occasional heading or subheading and so on. Once you get into the meat of things, a single bookmark will look something like this:

<DT><A HREF="https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/archie-the-internets-first-search-engine-is-rescued-and-running/" ADD_DATE="1716034651" LAST_MODIFIED="1725392030">Archie, the Internet’s first search engine, is rescued and running | Ars Technica</A>

When I was doing this, I wanted to be able to copy-paste a whole bunch of those lines into one of my org-mode files, and then magically turn each of them into an org heading with a hyperlink.

And because-Emacs, I used a keyboard macro.

The macro looks like this:

C-SPC C-s \" RET C-w C-s \" C-b C-SPC C-s > RET C-w SPC [ C-e DEL DEL DEL DEL ] ] C-r [ RET DEL ] C-a [ [ C-a * * SPC C-n C-a

I'm sure that's entirely clear.

Part of me would like there to be an emacs-lisp library that knows how to parse Firefox bookmarks, and turn them into some kind of canonical org-mode data structure. But part of me thinks that's not just overkill, it's the wrong approach.

A part of the point of my org-mode files is that they're my org-mode files. You almost certainly organise yours differently. A proper parser that translates bookmarks into a full file would probably work great for maybe one person, and just really niggle at everyone else.

On the other hand, I could share this keyboard macro. It doesn't parse the whole bookmarks file. It just turns one bookmarks line into one org heading. If you want to see how it works, you can follow the steps yourself on the sample data I gave you above, and see what each step does.⁶

When I was importing my bookmarks, I was constantly tweaking my macro to do slightly different things. Changing the org-heading level for example, by changing the number of * keystrokes.

To make the macro as easy as possible to share, I've wrapped it into a function in the worlds tiniest emacs package. You can download the firefox-import-helper.el file here, or you can do:

git clone https://kindness.city/git/gds-elisp.git

…or you can copy-paste the bits you want from the text below:

(defun gds-load-bookmark-to-org-macro()
  "Load a keyboard macro for orgifying FF bookmarks.

This macro assumes you're in a buffer with a bunch of Firefox bookmark
entries like this:


            <DT><A HREF=\"https://datagenetics.com/blog/september32012/index.html\" ADD_DATE=\"1715801496\" LAST_MODIFIED=\"1725392030\">PIN number analysis</A>
            <DT><A HREF=\"https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/archie-the-internets-first-search-engine-is-rescued-and-running/\" ADD_DATE=\"1716034651\" LAST_MODIFIED=\"1725392030\">Archie, the Internet’s first search engine, is rescued and running | Ars Technica</A>
            <DT><A HREF=\"https://rinkcalc.app/\" ADD_DATE=\"1716039548\" LAST_MODIFIED=\"1725392030\">Rink</A>

  Start with your cursor at the start of the line. The macro will turn
this line into an org-link, and will move you to the beginning of the
next line.

  NOTE: This macro will only work if `C-e' takes you to the end of the
bookmark. If you have long bookmarts (like the middle one above) and
you're using `visual-line-mode', this won't be the case. So turn it off.

  After running this function, and before you try to run the macro, you
should first run `edit-last-kbd-macro'.  This is for three reasons:

1) Your sysadmin will thank you for carefully inspecting any function you run

2) To customize the indentation-level of the resulting org-headline, or
to add properties, or whatever else you need.

3) Because I've chosen to load this macro into `last-kbd-macro' rather
than using a named macro as the Emacs manual suggests. This has the
advantage that I can fly through my edits using the default
`C-x-C-e-C-e-C-e...' shortcuts!  But also the disadvantage that the
types don't match what the first invocation of `C-x-C-e'
expects. Fortunately `edit-last-kbd-macro' is more forgiving, and fixes
the issue for us.  This should certainly be fixed, but it meets my needs
for now."

  (interactive)
  (setq last-kbd-macro
        (kmacro "C-SPC C-s \" RET C-w C-s \" C-b C-SPC C-s > RET C-w SPC [ C-e DEL DEL DEL DEL ] ] C-r [ RET DEL ] C-a [ [ C-a * * SPC C-n C-a")))