🔖 booker

a CLI bookmark manager for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, with tab completion for zsh, bash, and fish.

[sudo] gem install booker

That is the whole install. With fzf on your PATH, booker and booker <search> open a fuzzy picker over your bookmarks straight away - no shell configuration, and the same in zsh, bash and fish.

Tab completion is an extra rather than the way in. If you want it:

booker --install

Alternatively, the installation can be done incrementally:

booker -i comp # adding tab completion (every shell found)
booker -i conf # generate default config (~/.booker.yml)
booker -i book # locating bookmarks file

booker -i comp installs completion for every supported shell it finds on your machine. To set up just one:

booker -i zsh  # ~/.zsh/completion/_booker (or any writable $fpath dir)
booker -i bash # ~/.local/share/bash-completion/completions/booker
booker -i fish # ~/.config/fish/completions/booker.fish

booker                  # choose from every bookmark
booker [search_term]    # choose from the bookmarks matching a term

booker [your_search_term]<TAB>

booker github.com/jeremywrnr/booker

booker how to use the internet

If fzf is on your PATH, booker and booker <search> open a fuzzy picker over the matching bookmarks. Return opens the one you land on, and Esc cancels and does nothing. One bookmark per run - booker does not pass --multi, so Tab will not quietly mark a pile of them to open all at once.

The picker only appears when booker is talking to a terminal on both ends, so pipes (booker --complete-raw | ...), scripts, and the tab completion subshells all behave exactly as they did before. Without fzf installed the picker never engages either: booker prints its table and booker <search> searches, as always. Nothing here changes tab completion.

A search term that matches no bookmark still goes to your search engine, which is why booker how to use the internet keeps working. To search for something that does match a bookmark, ask for it explicitly with booker -s <term>. To get the plain table back when fzf is installed, use booker --list.

This is a tool that allows you to tab complete Chrome, Firefox, and Safari bookmarks, and then open them in the browser of your choice. Chrome stores bookmarks in a JSON file, Firefox uses a SQLite database, and Safari uses a binary plist. Booker can read and parse all three formats, and can even search across multiple bookmark sources simultaneously. Combined with an autocompletion mechanism (using a zsh script), you can easily open your bookmarks from the command line.

I was inspired by the kill autocompletion that ships with oh-my-zsh, where you are shown a list of the current processes, and you can tab through to select which one you'd like to kill. The completion actually is somewhat complex - if I search for 'System', it will only show processes whose name or group match against that, but it tab through these matches numeric process IDs, which is the argument that kill actually takes. I learned that zsh autocompletion has a large learning curve, despite the good amount of documentation out there on it.

You can also edit the ~/.booker.yml config file manually. booker will also try to determine which command should be used to open your browser based on your operating system, but you can also explicitly choose which command you want use, by adding the following:

:browser: 'your-browser-command '

To use something other than fzf for the interactive picker, name it with its flags. booker splits this itself rather than handing it to a shell, and expects the tool to read candidates on stdin and print the chosen ones on stdout:

:picker: 'sk --height=40% --reverse'

Note that a config file naming :picker: cannot be read by a version of booker older than this one - booker refuses to start on config keys it does not know.

There are some tests in /spec. If you clone this repo you can run them with just spec. There is also a justfile to build and install the gem locally, so you can run just build to build the gem.

just cov runs the suite with coverage, which is held at 100% - the report it writes is published to the coverage page. just docs builds that page together with this readme into site/, exactly as the Pages workflow does on a merge to main, so just docs-open shows you what will deploy.

The completion scripts live in /completions (_booker for zsh, booker.bash, booker.fish) and are read by booker --install at install time. They all feed off booker --complete-raw, which prints one tab separated id, title, url per match - unlike --complete, that output is never truncated or padded to the terminal width, so a script can parse it safely.

All three shells complete to the bookmark's url, which booker opens directly. zsh and fish also show the folder and title alongside each candidate; bash has no per-candidate descriptions, so it shows the urls alone. Completing to the url rather than to the bookmark id means the command line says what it is about to open, and 2_D0EE60F9-3910-4466-8B03-B7FE74C90803 said nothing.

Bookmark ids still work as arguments - booker 1_1017, and booker --bookmark

• so anything scripted against them keeps running.

To reload a script you are editing:

booker --install zsh && unfunction _booker && autoload -U _booker
booker --install bash && source ~/.bashrc
booker --install fish && exec fish