Several years ago, I deleted all bookmarks from my web browser and moved them into a plain text note. I then set up Alfred to always keep those important URLs right at my fingertips. This simple setup has since become a crucial part of my workflow, bringing me daily joy and impressed reactions from coworkers watching my screen. In this post, I’ll describe how it works.

Like many others, I had been guilty of neglecting web bookmarks. I relied on Google search or my browser’s address bar auto-completion and then navigated through the target website until I reached the destination page. At some point, I began bookmarking my most-used websites and relied on Alfred’s browser bookmarks search for quick access. However, it often took multiple clicks (and page loads) to reach the exact page I was after. So, I started bookmarking individual pages: Grafana dashboards, my profile settings on different apps, docs for specific libraries and modules, etc. This was a marked improvement, but there was an unexpected downside.

Turns out, managing bookmarks in the browser is a miserable experience. Simple operations like “update the title of a recently bookmarked URL” or “review all bookmarked pages for a particular website” often required multiple clicks through slow and unwieldy menus. To make things worse, Safari has two completely different bookmark-related UIs: “Show Bookmarks” (a sidebar) and “Edit Bookmarks” (a settings tab), both allowing editing, but only one of them supporting search. Yes, you can, in fact, open them in the same tab for extra confusion.

Now imagine you’re onboarding to a new team where, within the first few days, you’re likely to receive dozens of links to various dashboards, internal tools, and code repositories. Trying to organize these using the aforementioned browser UI is tedious, and in my opinion, this is why so many people give up and rely on scattered notes, search, and their address bar auto-completion to get around.

More than once, I thought, “This would be so much more manageable if it were just a text file.” So, when I was about to join a new project, I decided to try something different. I created a fresh Markdown note that looked something like this:

# Bookmarks

## Logging

Splunk - Trace transaction  
https://example.org/dashboard/trace-transaction

Splunk - HTTP Server Logs  
https://example.org/index/http

Splunk - RPC Server Logs  
https://example.org/index/rpc

## Monitoring

Grafana - HTTP Server Golden Metrics  
https://example.org/dashboard/http-server

Grafana - RPC Server Golden Metrics  
https://example.org/dashboard/rpc-server

I then set up an Alfred workflow that runs a program capable of reading this file and outputting it in Alfred’s Script Filter format. Initially, the program was a Ruby script, but eventually, I rewrote it in C with zero dependencies. Even without any caching or clever optimizations, the conversion is still instant, even on my 1,000-line bookmarks file. This workflow allows me to fire up Alfred and fuzzy search my entire collection of bookmarks. And if I type “edit” and press Return, it opens the bookmarks note in VS Code for quick editing. I briefly considered using a structured format like YAML or TOML, but I like how my Markdown-inspired text format is low on ceremony and also looks like a regular note in my note-taking app.

In terms of organization, I typically maintain a “Misc” section at the top and place new bookmarks there until it grows unwieldy, at which point I move things around in bulk (which is a breeze, thanks to text editors!). Another benefit of storing bookmarks as text is that I can easily share a bunch of related links with someone since it’s just a simple copy and paste: “Hey, Aliana, these are the three most important dashboards that we pay attention to.”

That’s it! That’s the pitch. I transitioned all of my actively used bookmarks to this format and haven’t looked back. I find it somewhat ironic that browsers used to store bookmarks in plain text, only to later switch to a local database—partly to prevent people from modifying the file with scripts.

If you currently rely mostly on your address bar and (maybe) sparse bookmarks but would like to try some of the ideas in this post, here are a few suggestions I often give to people who ask about my productivity tools:

• Start by utilizing your browser’s bookmarks. There’s already fuzzy search built into most browsers (in Safari, all bookmarks are searchable via Cmd+Shift+/). Get used to navigating this way instead of relying solely on the address bar. Add missing bookmarks as you go.
• Try Alfred or Raycast. These tools can teach you how to apply the same approach for navigating your clipboard history, files, and apps.
• Consider the text file approach. My C parser might be useful (even just as a reference) for Alfred users, but if Raycast is more your style or you’re a programmer, you may enjoy writing your own.
• You can, in fact, download my entire Alfred workflow from GitHub, but do so at your own risk as I don’t provide any support for my automation projects.