bmm

bmm (stands for "bookmarks manager") lets you get to your bookmarks in a flash.

It does so by storing your bookmarks locally, allowing you to quickly access, manage, and search through them using various commands. bmm has a traditional command line interface that can be used standalone and/or integrated with other tools, and a textual user interface for easy browsing.

🤔 Motivation

I'd been using buku for managing my bookmarks via the command line. It's a fantastic tool, but I was noticing some slowdown after years of collecting bookmarks in it. I was curious if I could replicate the subset of its functionality that I used while improving search performance. Additionally, I missed having a TUI to browse bookmarks in. bmm started out as a way to fulfill both goals. Turns out, it runs quite a lot faster than buku (check out benchmarks here). I've now moved my bookmark management completely to bmm, but buku remains an excellent tool, and those looking for a broader feature set should definitely check it out.

💾 Installation

homebrew:

brew install dhth/tap/bmm

cargo:

cargo install bmm

Or get the binaries directly from a Github release. Read more about verifying the authenticity of released artifacts here.

⚡️ Usage

Usage: bmm [OPTIONS] <COMMAND>

Commands:
  import    Import bookmarks from various sources
  delete    Delete bookmarks
  list      List bookmarks based on several kinds of queries
  save      Save/update a bookmark
  save-all  Save/update multiple bookmarks
  search    Search bookmarks by matching over terms
  show      Show bookmark details
  tags      Interact with tags
  tui       Open bmm's TUI
  help      Print this message or the help of the given subcommand(s)

Options:
      --db-path <STRING>  Override bmm's database location (default: <DATA_DIR>/bmm/bmm.db)
      --debug             Output debug information without doing anything
  -h, --help              Print help (see more with '--help')

⌨ CLI mode

bmm allows every action it supports to be performed via its CLI. As such, it can be easily integrated with other search tools (eg. Alfred, fzf, etc.)

Importing existing bookmarks

bmm allows importing bookmarks from various sources. It supports the following input formats:

• HTML (These are bookmark files exported by browsers like Firefox, Chrome, etc, in the NETSCAPE-Bookmark-file-1 format.)
• JSON
• TXT

bmm import firefox.html
bmm import bookmarks.json --dry-run
bmm import bookmarks.txt --reset-missing-details

An example HTML file

<!DOCTYPE NETSCAPE-Bookmark-file-1>
<!-- This is an automatically generated file.
     It will be read and overwritten.
     DO NOT EDIT! -->
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Security-Policy"
      content="default-src 'self'; script-src 'none'; img-src data: *; object-src 'none'"></meta>
<TITLE>Bookmarks</TITLE>
<H1>Bookmarks Menu</H1>

<DL><p>
    <DT><H3 ADD_DATE="1736450822" LAST_MODIFIED="1739920697" PERSONAL_TOOLBAR_FOLDER="true">Bookmarks Toolbar</H3>
    <DL><p>
        <DT><H3 ADD_DATE="1739896938" LAST_MODIFIED="1739920670">productivity</H3>
        <DL><p>
            <DT><H3 ADD_DATE="1739896992" LAST_MODIFIED="1739920767">crates</H3>
            <DL><p>
                <DT><A HREF="https://crates.io/crates/sqlx" ADD_DATE="1739897020" LAST_MODIFIED="1739897041" ICON_URI="https://crates.io/favicon.ico" TAGS="crates,rust">sqlx - crates.io: Rust Package Registry</A>
            </DL><p>
            <DT><A HREF="https://github.com/dhth/omm" ADD_DATE="1739920615" LAST_MODIFIED="1739920646" ICON_URI="https://github.com/fluidicon.png" TAGS="productivity,tools">GitHub - dhth/omm: on-my-mind: a keyboard-driven task manager for the command line</A>
            <DT><A HREF="https://github.com/dhth/hours" ADD_DATE="1739920661" LAST_MODIFIED="1739920670" ICON_URI="https://github.com/fluidicon.png" TAGS="productivity,tools">GitHub - dhth/hours: A no-frills time tracking toolkit for command line nerds</A>
        </DL><p>
        <DT><A HREF="https://github.com/dhth/bmm" ADD_DATE="1739920697" LAST_MODIFIED="1739920739" ICON_URI="https://github.com/fluidicon.png" TAGS="tools">GitHub - dhth/bmm: get to your bookmarks in a flash</A>
    </DL><p>
</DL>

An example JSON file

[
  {
    "uri": "https://github.com/dhth/bmm",
    "title": null,
    "tags": "tools,bookmarks"
  },
  {
    "uri": "https://github.com/dhth/omm",
    "title": "on-my-mind: a keyboard-driven task manager for the command line",
    "tags": null
  }
]

An example TXT file

https://github.com/dhth/bmm
https://github.com/dhth/omm
https://github.com/dhth/hours

Saving/updating a bookmark

# save a new URI
bmm save https://github.com/dhth/bmm

# save a new URI with title and tags
bmm save https://github.com/dhth/omm \
    --title 'a keyboard-driven task manager for the command line' \
    --tags 'tools,productivity'

# update the title of a previously saved bookmark
bmm save https://github.com/dhth/bmm \
    --title 'yet another bookmarking tool'

# append to the tags of a previously saved bookmark
bmm save https://github.com/dhth/omm \
    --tags 'task-manager'

# use your editor to provide details
bmm save https://github.com/dhth/bmm -e

Saving/updating several bookmarks at a time

# save/update multiple bookmarks via arguments
bmm save \
    'https://github.com/dhth/bmm' \
    'https://github.com/dhth/omm' \
    --tags 'cli,bookmarks'

# save/update multiple bookmarks via stdin
cat << EOF | bmm save --tags tools --reset-missing-details -s
https://github.com/dhth/bmm
https://github.com/dhth/omm
https://github.com/dhth/hours
EOF

Listing bookmarks based on several queries

bmm allows listing bookmarks based on queries on bookmark uri/title/tags. The first two are pattern matched, while the last is matched exactly.

bmm list --uri 'github.com' \
    --title 'command line' \
    --tags 'tools,productivity' \
    --format json

Searching bookmarks by terms

Sometimes you want to search for bookmarks without being very granular. The search command allows you to do so. It accepts a list of terms, and will return bookmarks where all of the terms are matched over any attribute or tag belonging to a bookmark. You can also open the results in bmm's TUI.

# search bookmarks based on search terms
bmm search cli rust tool bookmarks --format delimited

# open search results in bmm's TUI
bmm search cli rust tool bookmarks --tui

Show bookmark details

bmm show 'https://github.com/dhth/bmm'

Interaction with tags

# Show saved tags
bmm tags list \
    --format json \
    --show-stats

# open saved tags in bmm's TUI
bmm tags list --tui

# rename tag
bmm tags rename old-tag new-tag

# delete tags 
bmm tags delete tag1 tag2 tag3

Delete bookmarks

bmm delete 'https://github.com/dhth/bmm' 'https://github.com/dhth/omm'

# skip confirmation
bmm delete --yes 'https://github.com/dhth/bmm'

📟 TUI mode

To allow for easy browsing, bmm ships with its own TUI. It can be launched either in a generic mode (via bmm tui) or in the context of a specific command (e.g., bmm search tools --tui).

The TUI lets you do the following:

• Search bookmarks based on terms
• List all tags
• View bookmarks that hold a tag

Feature requests for the TUI can be submitted via bmm's issues page.

🔐 Verifying release artifacts

In case you get the bmm binary directly from a release, you may want to verify its authenticity. Checksums are applied to all released artifacts, and the resulting checksum file is attested using Github Attestations.

Steps to verify (replace A.B.C in the commands below with the version you want):

1. Download the sha256 checksum file for your platform from the release:

   curl -sSLO https://github.com/dhth/bmm/releases/download/vA.B.C/bmm-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.xz.sha256

2. Verify the integrity of the checksum file using gh.

   gh attestation verify bmm-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.xz.sha256 --repo dhth/bmm

3. Download the compressed archive you want, and validate its checksum:

   curl -sSLO https://github.com/dhth/bmm/releases/download/vA.B.C/bmm-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.xz
   sha256sum --ignore-missing -c bmm-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.xz.sha256

4. If checksum validation goes through, uncompress the archive:

   tar -xzf bmm-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.xz
   cd bmm-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
   ./bmm
   # profit!

🙏 Acknowledgements

bmm sits on the shoulders of the following crates:

• clap
• csv
• dirs
• lazy_static
• once_cell
• open
• ratatui
• regex
• select
• serde
• serde_json
• sqlx
• tempfile
• thiserror
• tokio
• input
• url
• which