lnks allows you to search through and open browser bookmarks on the command line. Use it for yourself or to share important bookmarks with your team.

All credit to Ham Vocke, I just wrapped this in a Nix flake for portability. Check out his blog post and his repository for more details.

Before you can get started, you've got to set up a few things once.

Install Nix and enable flakes, then simply run

nix profile install github:Benni-Math/lnks

You can open a specific bookmark file via the open subcommand:

lnks --edit bookmarks.txt

you can also omit the .txt extension:

lnks --edit bookmarks

By default, these files will be storied (and queried from) ~/.bookmarks/, but you can change this directory by using the --dir flag.

Following the pattern in bookmarks.txt add all your bookmarks into one (or many) .txt files in your bookmarks directory.

Like this:

My bookmark https://example.com
Stack Overflow https://stackoverflow.com
lnks Git Repository https://github.com/hamvocke/lnks

The rules:

• One bookmark per line
• Each line consists of a searchable name and a URL
• The URL goes last and is separated from the searchable name with a space
• The file needs to have the .txt extension
• You can have as many .txt files in your bookmarks directory as you want

1. Run lnks
2. Type to run a fuzzy search against the names of your bookmarks
3. Use arrow keys to navigate up and down
4. Hit Enter to open a bookmark in your browser

Usage: lnks.sh [OPTIONS...]
  -k         --keep-open     Keep lnks open after selecting a bookmark
  -d <dir>   --dir <dir>     Specify a directory where bookmarks files are stored
  -e <file>  --edit <file>   Edit the specified bookmarks file (with vim)

lnks works well for software development teams. Use it to share a well-known list of bookmarks to your production and staging systems, your build pipelines, your bug tracker, important observability dashboards or whatever else might be relevant for your day to day work.

Add all your team's important URLs to a text file, and share as a git repo with your team. Team members can add, update and remove bookmarks and check them back in to your shared repository to ensure that everyone's got up to date bookmarks to important URLs and systems.