Guide to Productive Bookmarks

How many tabs do you have open?

Organizing the internet is a seemingly impossible task and being productive in all the noise can be difficult. While modern browsers and search engines make this easier I've found that some of their decisions have made it harder.

Here's a radical approach to radical productivity!

But first, the problems.

The Problem with Modern Browsing

You can tell that navigation and organization are important, with modern browsers they have tabs, bookmarks, and in some cases their own search engine. But these integrations are, by my account, detrimental to productivity. The usefulness of all tools is bound to the user using them. Sometimes they don't even get to choose they sometimes have to use these tools even for basic browsing.

But I think the experience could be better.

Tabs are frustrating to find, manage, and most importantly they devour system resources when they're not being used. And while everyone loved tabs when they first came to the browser, I think it's safe to say that the user's thirst for data can break the browser.

I think, in part, tabs were created because the dock (dock/tray/taskbar) and browser bookmarks weren't sufficient.

Why wasn't the dock sufficient?

This is a hard question to answer because Windows invented it in the 1990s as the "tray" aka a dock.

There was also Quick Launch which gave the user the ability to query the file system without having to manually search through the hierarchical file system. As far as I know this wasn't included in the end product but I'm not entirely sure since I was born around that time.

Why weren't bookmarks sufficient?

Bookmarks, at least bookmarks represented to the user as a hierarchical structure (folders), is hard even when you're the one making it.

So while the contained context of a bookmark makes a lot of sense organizing it and recalling it seems to be the hard part.

Why weren't tabs sufficient?

Tabs help organize a users thoughts in one "session" as they explore, compare, and navigate different contexts.

What I think we can do better with tabs is quite literally making them more available and accessible to the OS through better "windowing" techniques.

The Solution(s)

This is about being radically productive so naturally the main solution here is the Linux one.

Linux

I made bookit a fast and simple bookmark manager and rofi-bookit as the GUI launcher to be used with the i3 window manager.

You'll also need ztabs unless you have a better browser than chromium without tabs!

With this setup you can configure i3 to allow for tabs at the OS level. And windows/sites become a first class citizen to your OS with a single keybinding!

Don't stop there though!

Remember we're looking for radical productivity and like browser tabs we can get carried away with this.

So here's the kicker close our new tabs/windows...

With our integration with i3 and bookit we don't need to keep stuff open anymore we bookmark the things we want and heavily rely on bookit and our search engine.

Have fun experimenting!

Windows

With Windows this already exists with the Windows Cortona search bar.

However, the fact that I don't desire to use Windows and the ability to search with a different browser from the Windows search bar requires you to download things like

MacOS

On MacOS you can use Spotlight to search the computer as well as "Top Hits" from the internet but that

As far as I know, this cannot be changed.

Program Links

• ztabs: Chromium extension for ultimate productivity.

• bookit: Fast and simple bookmark manager for your operating system.

• rofi-bookit: Rofi Bookit launcher!