BookmarksBase is a tool that allows for searching in your bookmarks including entire contents of web sites, addresses and titles.

Currently supports only Firefox

How to start?

• Run BookmarksBase.Importer. It reads all your bookmarks, downloads clean text from the bookmarked websites and stores in current folder SQLite database file.
• Please note, that some anti-virus software may consider the importer as suspicious. It opens many connections in parallel to download web sites, which is quite unusual. I personally added whole folder to Windows Defender exceptions.
• Enjoy using BookmarksBase.Search.exe. It supports regular expressions and searches in the indexed web page contents. Type help: to view some extra features.

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1. Instructions for the user

• BookmarksBase.Importer.exe — First run this tool to generate database of bookmarks along with their contents.

• BookmarksBase.Search.exe — Main application intended for searching. It searches through text from bookmarked websites

• When application starts, searching box is already focused. Start typing the text and press Enter

• You can use TAB to switch between search box and results list

• You can move up and down using keyboard when results list is focused

• Search is case insensitive and a text you enter is compiled as a regular expression

• If you wish to express any number of any characters use .*

• Double click on results list item opens it in a web browser

• Enter while focused on results list also opens selected item in a web browser

• You can switch between grouped and ungrouped view by using option in the context menu

2. Source code structure

• BookmarksBase.Search — WPF application to perform searches
• BookmarksBase.Importer — Command line utility to import bookmarks from web browser and pull text from web pages
• BookmarksBase.Storage — DLL library with the implementation of the search as well as i/o with database file
• Experimental BookmarksBase.Exporter — Command line utility to export boomarks from SQLite database into MS SQL database. You probably will not need this.

3. Release notes

• All applications are written for .NET9
• Currently only Firefox web browser is supported. Other implementations can easily be created by inheriting BookmarksImporter class (following open-closed principle)
• It is possible to launch BookmarksImporter in the ad-hoc mode, where desired URLs are provided in appsettings.importer.json instead of pulling them from the Firefox browser profile. This is the default mode in the settings file from release package
• HTML parsing is done with Lynx and thus its binaries (included) are required to run the importer