The Ultimate Bookmarks Guide
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## The Ultimate Bookmarks Guide

Glad to see you again, mortal. Now, we are going to learn about bookmarks - how to use them, how to maintain them, and also something more about the file formats and maybe even about the code structure later. But don't fear, we won't burden you with it, just stop reading when you already know enough.

In order to read this, you need some common sense, the ability to start ELinks and some idea about what's a Web document, a URL address and knowledge like that.

If we ever mention some keys here, please note that you can rebind almost any action to another key which you like more - then you must obviously imagine your own key in place of that. Below, we will list all actions, options and so on related to bookmarks. We won't tell you how to rebind the keys, though; another document will take on that.

Somewhat out-of-order, a very frequent FAQ: In order to move bookmarks around, you need to mark them first - press Insert or * (if you use the default keymap) to do that.

### The Bookmark Manager

Basically, almost everything is going on in the so-called bookmark manager. That's a special dialog window, which contains a listing of all the bookmarks you ever told ELinks to remember and it lets you to do with them anything you would ever want to do with them.

You launch the bookmark manager by pressing the s key in standby (standard) mode. You should see a big empty space (bookmarks will slowly appear there as you will add them) and couple of buttons shriveling at the bottom. So, as a start, move with the right (or left; both will do) arrow to the button Add bookmark and fill in the input fields it offers to you. I mean, you can type something like "ELinks homepage" to the first field, then move down by e.g. the down arrow and fill "http://elinks.cz/" to the second field. Then, bravely press enter and watch the bookmark popping up at the top of the vast area reserved for bookmarks.

Repeat this step few times. Now, you can move between bookmarks by the up and down arrow, jump to the location any of them points to by the Goto button, change it by the Edit button, delete it with the Delete button and so on. When you'll become bored, press the escape button and you're free again!

### The Ancient Forests

It's not very convenient to have all the bookmarks mixed up - soon, you will get lost in them. Thus, in ELinks you can categorize them to various folders, subfolders, subsubfolders and so on, then you can expand and back enfold them and so on.

In order to create your first folder, use the button Add folder and fill the first input field. You can safely ignore the URL field, ELinks will do the same. POOF and you see it - it has that strange `[+]` or `[-]` thing there. If it has `[+]` near, it's enfolded, while when it has `[-]` near, it is expanded, while you can change that by pressing the spacebar.

In order to add a bookmark into a folder, move on the item of the folder (it must be expanded) or onto any bookmark inside of the folder and simply do the usual Add bookmark job. You can also move the bookmarks around, obviously. Before pressing the Move button, you need to first mark all the bookmarks (or even folders) you want to move using the Insert or * key—asterisk will appear near of all marked bookmarks—and then move to where you want to have the stuff moved to.

Separators can be inserted as well, using Add separator button, or by entering a special bookmark with "-" as title and no url.

### Searching for a needle in the haystack

Of course, you can search in the bookmarks. Just use the Find button - for convenience, you have the current document's URL and title pre-filled there, and for convenience only up-up-enter-down-down sequence is enough to have the playground clean. Then, just fill a substring of what you are looking for, and the bookmarks will be filtered so that only the matching ones are shown. (Actually, currently it will not be filtered but the cursor will only jump to the first matching bookmark below the current cursor position - and it will NOT wrap around. The exact behaviour changes time by time and hasn't been stabilized yet.)

### File formats

ELinks supports two bookmark formats: the native format and a generic bookmark exchange format called XBEL. Each of those formats has its pros and cons, which we shall discuss below. You can switch between then by changing the option bookmarks.file_format.

However, first please note that ELinks CANNOT read Links bookmarks directly. Importing Links-0.9x (or Links-1.x) bookmarks is easy - it is just matter of changing all the | (pipe) characters to tabs. There is a script for that in the contrib/conv/ directory. Importing Links-2.xx bookmarks is not so easy; in fact, the scribe knows of no way of doing that at the time of writing this, so this is up to you to figure out (if you do, please tell us so that we can add it here). Perhaps you might find a way to convert Links2 bookmarks to the XBEL format, which can then be loaded in ELinks.

#### Native file format

This is the preferred bookmarks format, which is also used by default. The bookmarks file is `~/.config/elinks/bookmarks`, in a simple format:

    <name> '\t' <url> [ '\t' <depth> ['\t' <flags>] ] '\n'

\t represents a tab character, \n represents a newline character. [Square brackets] denote optional parts. The <name> and <url> fields should be obvious. <depth> contains the depth level of the entry - by that, ELinks can unambiguously figure out the bookmarks hierarchy:

    Bookmarks structure:                                Depth:
     ,-- The Pasky's C Bestiary                         0
    [-]- Wonderful things                               0
     |    |-- Christmas Carol in l33tsp34k by L.M.      1
     |   [-]- Beautiful Potato Camera Shots             1
     |   [-]- Gallery of Scary Images of Jonas Fonseca  1
     |         |-- Jonas torturing gdb                  2
     |        [-]- Urgh                                 2
     |         |    `-- Jonas consuming Tofu            3
     |         `-- Jonas with crashed ELinks            2
     |-- Slides from Witek's hack-patch show            0
     `-- Miciah's English Grammar Spellbook             0

<flags> is a string of characters. Currently, two flags are supported:

Flag | Description
--- | ---
E | This folder is currently expanded. (No effect for non-folders.)
F | This entry is a folder. The <url> part is usually empty.

Separators: these are special bookmarks with "-" as title and no url.

Pros
  Naturally, ELinks handles the native format the best, easiest and most reliably.
Cons
  It is unlikely that you could use the native format anywhere else than in ELinks.

To use the native format, set bookmarks.file_format = 0.

#### XBEL file format

The XBEL file format support was added at some point during the 0.4 development by Fabio Boneli. It has never been complete and has plenty of troubles, but generally, it works at the basic level. The bookmarks file is `~/.config/elinks/bookmarks.xbel` (thanks to a different filename, you can have both XBEL and native bookmarks saved in your `~/.config/elinks` directory).

We shall not describe the XBEL file format here,

    http://pyxml.sourceforge.net/topics/xbel/

is the authoritative resource on that. It also contains list of some of the applications supporting the format. Basically, you will be probably able to convert from/to the XBEL format to/from most of the other widely used formats, so this way you can import your bookmarks to ELinks from basically anything.

Pros
  XBEL is the gateway to the rest of the bookmarks world.
Cons
  The support for XBEL is incomplete and there are known bugs. Especially, national character sets are basically not supported, so ELinks will most likely get it wrong if you have any non-ASCII characters in your bookmarks. Generally, the XBEL support should be considered experimental and you shouldn't rely on it. It could trash your XBEL bookmarks file so make regular backups.

To use the XBEL format, set bookmarks.file_format to 1.

#### Usage hints

As already noted above, probably the best usage pattern is to use XBEL for importing/exporting your bookmarks to/from ELinks and the native format for regular operation. Of course, if you want to synchronize your bookmarks in ELinks and some other XBEL-supporting gadget and you are brave, you can use XBEL as your exclusive bookmark format - the choice is upon you.

Regarding the bookmarks synchronization, there is one important note. ELinks saves your bookmarks each time you added one through the a shortcut (add-bookmark action) or when closing the bookmarks manager if you made any changes or when quitting ELinks. However, ELinks reads your bookmarks only ONCE, during the startup. This behaviour may change in the future (tell us if you need a way for ELinks to re-read the bookmarks file), but this is how it is done now.

Actually, you may now ask "So how do I convert bookmarks between the two formats?". It is quite easy. ELinks simply follows the current value of bookmarks.file_format whenever loading/saving the bookmarks.

So, e.g. if you normally use the native format but you want the bookmarks to be saved in the XBEL format once, change bookmarks.file_format to 1, then cause the bookmarks to be resaved (e.g. by doing some simple change, like adding a trailing space to some bookmark's title or so), then change the bookmarks.file_format value back to 0.

It is a little more complicated if you normally use the native format but you want to import bookmarks from the XBEL format once. You again change bookmarks.file_format to 1, then cause the bookmarks to be reloaded. That involves saving the configuration, quitting ELinks _completely_ (that means closing/killing all instances of it you have running), then restarting it and changing bookmarks.file_format to 0. Then save the configuration again and cause ELinks to resave the bookmarks.

Agreed, this all strange dances are quite clumsy, likely some simple wizard-like interface for switching the bookmarks formats will be introduced in the future. So far, we have had no reports from our users that anyone wants to switch their bookmarks format frequently, so this is not too high on our TODO list. So be sure to tell us if you would like this process to be simplified rather sooner than later.

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