As I mentioned in my Qutebrowser article, my browser doesn't have the ability to share bookmarks with my other browsers. I run Chrome on my phone and Chrome on my Chromebook. And I have a second Linux laptop that also runs Qutebrowser.

I needed a solution to share bookmarks between them. And I settled on Linkding.

My Search

I looked through Reddit r/selfhost and scoured the web looking at different self-hosted bookmark services I could run at home.

Honestly, there aren't too many of them that are good, free, easy to manage, and have a lot of features. I settled on Linkding (despite its name) but, to be honest, I didn't really use it much. I imported all of my bookmarks from Chrome into it, but I didn't find myself using it much.

Chrome

Chrome has its own bookmark manager and it shares amongst other Chrome browsers you log into.

Up until recently, I didn't know about a Linkding extension for adding bookmarks, so I'm currently giving that a whirl.

Qutebrowser

Qutebrowser doesn't have plugins. Plus, it has its own Quickmarks system that integrates well inside the browser, but doesn't sync anywhere. I may be able to script something to share Quickmarks between my Linux systems -- we'll see.

Rofi

Recently I started thinking more and more about what I can do with Rofi. Rofi is a drop in replacement for dmenu that has a few more features and looks nicer (and doesn't require recompiling to change a configuration option).

So I wrote rofi-linkding to use Rofi to present a list of bookmarks that is searchable and will open in your default browser (using xdg-open).

When viewing the bookmarks list in rofi-linkding, by default the links are listed by Title. Pressing Alt+2 will show the tags. Alt+3 will show the URLs. Alt+4 will show the titles, tags, and URLs.

At the "Bookmark:" prompt, you can search through any of the text (titles, tags, URLs) that are showing below. So to just search the tags, you can press Alt+2 and then search through the tags.

Qutebrowser keybinding

Now that I have a way to launch links from Linkding, I needed an easy way to save them too.

In Qutebrowser, I typed:

:bind <Ctrl+m> open -t https://my.linkding.server/bookmarks/new?url={url}&auto_close=true

This lets me press Ctrl+m to add a bookmark of the current page I'm viewing. Qutebrowser opens the Linkding new bookmark page in a new tab where I can enter the Title, Description, and Tags fields (though it attempts to automatically fill Title and Description from the website, if it can. After saving the bookmark, Linkding's page let's me know it's OK to close the tab.

Conclusion

Linkding, rofi-linkding, and Qutebrowser's keybindings to Linkding's new bookmark page makes using and sharing bookmarks bearable.