Hey there,
another thread just made me notice something concerning bookmarks.
Dolphin has its bookmarks, Konsole has its own bookmarks, when I open the file picker (for example, saving output in Konsole), this, again, has its own bookmarks. There probably might be more applications that have them aswell? They all seem to use the same bookmark editor tool for management.
My problems with this:
Isn’t it kind of crazy these bookmarks aren’t combined in some way?
The bookmark editor doesn’t even acknowledge there being other applications with bookmarks, even though it has a sidebar which does not seem to serve any use other than displaying “Bookmarks”
I can open the editor on its own by starting keditbookmarks and create bookmarks for… what exactly? (actually, those show up in Konqueror… after I installed it)
Creating a new bookmark in the editor always fills the location with “http://”, no matter the context
Why does it allow me to create a “web url” bookmark for dolphin, konsole or the file picker in the first place, even though nothing happens when I open it?
And why do I have to recreate bookmarks for the file picker when my dolphin bookmarks already exist in the first place?
Either I’m missing something or this is all very confusing.
Obviously I don’t think having one bookmark pool for everything would be ideal, there’s definitely the case to be made that different applications might want to have different bookmarks (although it gets a bit blurry for the dolphin/file picker situation), but here’s my suggestions:
the bookmark editor should be a “global” management tool and show all applications that have bookmarks functionality (in the left sidebar?) and make it possible to switch between them
it needs to be possible/easy to move/copy bookmarks between applications (it actually already is possible through the clipboard, if you know how)
there should be a “global” bookmark category, which makes a bookmark available in all applications
applications should define the “bookmark types” they support for easier editing and so web urls don’t show up where they shouldn’t
Obviously, I haven’t considered any technical limitations in this write-up (because I don’t know them), this is purely from a user perspective
the feature does seem to be promising more than it delivers and could use some love.
i’m still on plasma 5 and bookmarks for dolphin at are now kept in ~/.local/share/kfile/
which seems new to me and my backup archives since i don’t have backups of this folder prior to last week or so… this could indicate that some work is going on.
for me, the file picker in kate will show me the same bookmarks as those in dolphin, but wil not include the bookmarks made in konsole, and vice versa… maybe that should be corrected.
there is also a bookmarking feature within kate itself (and okular), but that seems to bookmark places within a document and should not be confused with directory bookmarks… we probably do not want a bookmarks.xml file holding file names and page locations of what might be sensitive content.
if we think of a bookmark as a thing to mark a place within a trove of data then the context of where you are using feature matters more than the item it creates.
i would not want to co-mingle bookmarks from okular with bookmarks from konsol because they are doing completely different things and refer to completely different types of data troves.
as another thing throw into the pool, there is also this thread about adding a direct keyboard shortcut to bookmarks
Interesting, I’m currently on 6.5.6 and that file only contains the bookmarks I added through the file picker. Dolphin has its own bookmarks.xml in ~/.local/share/dolphin/, as do konsole and konquerer each.
I agree that these bookmarks are very contextual, but grouping them by type (file path, web url, …) would feel logical for me.
And yeah, that’s the thread that made me realize konsole had bookmarks in the first place and sent me down this rabbit hole.
So yes, like Firefox they’re arranged starting with a root directory, then a ‘Bookmarks Toolbar’ where any bookmarks/folders work for the browser…
You’d just have a unique path for Konsole and Dolphin - that way, bookmarks in Dolphin don’t get lost…
This is why I mentioned Konsole with zoxide to be honest, I often open Kate before I find a file, then open the terminal to find the file - and that’s why I like my bookmarks in zoxide, because that works also for Konsole, Kitty, whatever other terminal you use.