Ask HN: How Do You Bookmark?

Hi HN,

It seems I’m always drowning in a sea of bookmarks, open tabs, and saved links that I "save for later"—only to completely forget about them. This has been frustrating and has pushed me to start building my own filing/bookmarking system.

I want something I can access from the browser, the terminal, and my phone, and I’m just beginning to put it together.

That brings me to my question: How do you manage saved information? Specifically, how do you organize, search, and tag your content? More importantly, how do you design an interface that makes it easy—and actually appealing for meat-brains like me—to return to and use what you’ve saved?

For instance, I’ve thought about building a browser extension to replace my YouTube feed, which I often scroll through mindlessly, with something more intentional. I’d also love to annotate PDFs, websites, and other content, then store and access it all in a unified space.

I think The Problem I keep running into is just friction. I’ve tried apps like Obsidian, but I find them hard to maintain. I even wrote scripts to clean up things like images and URLs automatically, and set up sync, but it felt clunky, and I didn’t use it as much as I thought I would. Now I’m trying again and really want to get it right this time.

So I’m curious:

    What UI/UX features or workflows would make you actually use a system like this consistently?
    Do you have ideas or examples of systems that are particularly low-friction and effective?
    Have you found workarounds for these kinds of challenges?
    Or are there tangentially related ideas or discussions you think might be relevant?

I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences!

Brave (browser) has features for most of the things you are asking about. they have bookmarks and read later. they also have great a great reader mode for speeding up your reading sessions. They have a mobile and desktop versions, just guessing the way that brave works they probably have something you can do in the terminal to connect as well

I don’t bookmark. I have a "Home" page with "One-liners & Links of the Day." The links are listed in reverse chronological order by day. Only this month is kept on the home page. There are links to previous months’ home pages at the bottom. Since it's a web page, I am not constrained to how some “Bookmark” manager wants me to view links. I can add whatever I want. Annotations, color, and non-links like code snippets are in there. If there is Too Much Information (TMI) I collapse it in a detail / summary HTML tag.

If I actually go back frequently to a link or to a piece of code, I put that link or code snippet in a more permanent "Document" web page which groups the items by topic. For example:

    Typography

        — ‘ ’ “ ” • … × °

At the moment, I am keeping the web pages local. There is a duplicate on an actual web server so it can be accessed from other devices.

Vivaldi has “add to this folder” in every folder in the bookmark bar. I just go there and add. Also its bookmark editing menu is just better. And it can middle-click open bookmarks without closing the menu. Chrome and FF bookmarks are almost useless ui-wise.

I still migrated to FF due to MV3 but it feels real shitty in comparison, tbh. Idk how people use it beyond dead stupid use cases.

how do you organize, search, and tag your content

I create a folder hierarchy on the bookmarks bar and sometimes custom-name bookmarks that are important to find. Search through url bar.

Once in a while I go through a folder and delete impulsive bookmarks.

Basically I perceive these as a filesystem. Would be nice if they were actually mapped into $HOME/Bookmarks.