The stash man is an asshole, or how I use browser bookmarks

For sev­eral years I col­lected sites in Chrome book­marks¹, in “to watch” and “to read” lists. In the end most of the links just died there. In prac­tice, browser book­marks are good for what they were made for: quick access to pages you open often. Storing links there that you’ll have to sort later, let alone links to ref­er­ence mate­r­ial you may never need, turned out to be impractical. You end up either with a dump of links where noth­ing can be found, or spend­ing time main­tain­ing a folder hier­ar­chy and search­ing anyway.

Since then I’ve switched to macOS, and now I open book­marks with Alfred search.

Here’s how it looks:

The beauty of it is that I no longer have to mess around with book­mark folders. Everything sits in one folder; mine is called “Current”. Searching by book­mark folder name works too, though, if you still feel like nerd­ing out:

When Alfred turns up an old book­mark I don’t need, I go to chrome://bookmarks/, type in the same query and clear out the junk.

By the way, the chrome://bookmarks/ page itself is in my book­marks too, for quick access 👀

Bookmark search doesn’t handle word forms, so-called fuzzy search, so when I add a book­mark I now name it the way I sus­pect I might search for the page in the future. I add syn­onyms, and a Russian trans­la­tion if the page title is in English, and vice versa.

To add a new book­mark, I press Cmd+D and type in what­ever’s needed:

Here’s what my browser book­marks look like now:

I switched off the book­marks bar too. It’s now easier to open a page with Alfred than to reach for an icon with the mouse. Besides, the browser window looks cleaner (I often work on the laptop screen, and ver­ti­cal space is scarce), and it doesn’t dis­tract me with calls to feed the dopamine addict on Twitter or Facebook.

With the bar gone, I no longer need to orga­nize and update the links and icons on it. One task fewer.

All in all, I’m happy with Alfred: I have what I need at hand and don’t waste time on extras.