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Under the Anvil

Hande, a Bookmark Manager with a Difference

Browsers make it easy to return to your favourite websites. What if the same idea worked outside the browser? Meet hande, the bookmark manager for the terminal.

Ishe Chinyoka,

Hande, a Bookmark Manager with a Difference

Ishe Chinyoka

The idea behind bookmarks

Browsing the web is pleasant not only because of what you can find there, but because it is easy to keep track of where you found it.

Try this in any browser:

  • search for a subject you like;
  • open a site about it;
  • press Ctrl+D to bookmark it.

The site now appears among your bookmarks. Every modern browser comes with a bookmark manager built in.

A bookmark manager takes away the drudgery of writing down every place you visit. When you want to go back, you open the list, pick the site by its title rather than by its address, and you are there.

Now, what if we had the same convenience outside the browser, in the console or the terminal?

We can, with hande. The name is Shona for “let’s go!”

Getting hande

To use hande, you first need to install it. Its home page has instructions for Debian-based distributions such as Ubuntu, Linux Mint and Debian itself, and for Arch and the distributions built on it. There is also a short installation script that you run with curl.

Using hande

hande is a command-line bookmark manager written in Rust. It does not only store your bookmarks: it takes you to them.

hande works in two ways: as a command-line tool and as a shell of its own.

hande on the command line

To open a bookmark from any terminal, type hande followed by the bookmark’s name. If you have a bookmark called “shopping” that opens Amazon, type:

hande shopping

Behind the scenes, hande finds the bookmark with that name and opens it with the right program. If there is no bookmark by that name, hande tells you so, and suggests that you create one.

Either way, hande does its one job and gets out of your way. When you just want to open something and carry on with your work, the command line is the way to use it.

The hande shell

Type hande without anything after it, and it starts as a shell. It greets you with “hande, let’s go!”, along with its licence and how to contact the developer, and then shows its own prompt, hlg> (“hlg” for “hande, let’s go”).

At that prompt, type the name of a bookmark as you would type a command in a terminal: shopping, and Enter.

The shell’s advantage is completion. Type the first few letters of a bookmark and press Tab: hande lists the bookmarks that begin with them. When you find the one you want, press Enter to open it.

Conclusion

This post only scratches the surface of what hande can do. A bookmark can be a web address, a command, or a place in your own file system, and you can make bookmarks that search the web.

To find out more about hande,

We are planning features for chatting with AI agents from the terminal, so watch this space. Your feedback shapes what comes next: what you tell us will find its way into the next release of hande.

Thank you for reading, and may you never lose your favourite haunts, whether on the web or off it.