In this post, we are going to address a question that is frequently asked: as both the Textsmith and hande work with bookmarks, what is their difference or similarity in how they handle them?

These are two complementary tools that we are proud to tout their features and how they can make life easier for someone who works on the terminal.

The tools

First, let us look at these tools.

While they are complementary, they serve two different purposes:

• the Textsmith is just a terminal. It comes in two flavours: the GTK version and the Electron version. This means that as it is, it is just a program that makes it possible to send commands to your shell. That’s it.
• On the other hand, hande, Let’s Go! is a bookmark manager. You cannot send any other command to the shell, except to itself. Whatever you type in hande is not a command but a bookmark name, which hanbde itself resolves.

From this, we can see that there is no way that Textsmith as a terminal can stand in place of hande, and vice versa. This means you cannot use the textsmith as a bookmark management tool, neither can you use hande as a terminal.

Whence the confusion?

Other than the fact that both tools are forged from the same anvil, the mix-up can be a result of their power:

• While the Textsmith is a terminal, it supports bookmarking of commands. The same way that you can bookmark a URL in your browser or a folder in your file manager is how the textsmith does for any commands. This means that while your browser or file manager is not a bookmark manager simply because it has that feature to create favourites, so is the textsmith.
• On the other hand, hande is wholly dedicated to managing bookmarks: you can bookmark not only commands, but anything that can be bookmarked from URLs to directories in the filesystem.
• However, hande comes with its own shell just like Python or any other database management like psql for Postgres, the SQLite shell and so on. These programs provide a convenient interface to interact with either the programming language or the database. This is how hande does: it comes with its own shell to let you easily manage your bookmarks. But just as the shells we referred to cannot be conflated with GUI terminals, so is the hande shell. It cannot be used to send commands to your shell.

The Scope of Bookmarks

Now let us turn to the scope of the bookmarks handled by each of these utilities: textsmith can only work with command bookmarks.

hande on the other hand, works with two types of bookmarks:

• Location bookmarks, and
• Command bookmarks.

The Bookmark Syntax

Now a key difference is in the syntax or the DSL used by each of these tools:

• The textsmith bookmarks look more like comments in a scripting language. This was a deliberate choice: you can create a bookmark while in the terminal and just call Alt-m to add it to the list of other bookmarks.
• The way a bookmark is created in the textsmith terminal is start a line with a hash mark, then a bookmark name without a space between a hash mark and the name, an optional description and a colon, then the command to be run.
• The hande bookmarks are deliberately framed to look like bookmarks: you have a line beginning with a name, followed by the location in angle brackets, and the handler of the bookmark.
• hande supports categories, category nesting, metadata information like tags and description for each bookmark whereas the textsmith does not.

Conclusion

Both the textsmith terminal and hande are standalone tools: you do not have to install both of them to use one. This means that you can just install hande and use it in any terminal of your choice. There are no dependencies between these tools.

While we may want you to run both, yet we realise that the major attraction of the opensource has to do with choices and the modularity of different programs from different developers. We are not here to change that.

This means that you can bookmark your commands in the textsmith terminal and not care about hande.

Bookmark management just found its way into the textsmith as a way to make it stand out: you do not have to lose your place or remember long commands and their options. Just bookmark them. Next time you want, just consider running it as a bookmark with or without any arguments.

Conversely, feel free to just install hande on its own and use it in any terminal, or even in a text-based console, and not think about the textsmith terminal.

If you happen to install both hande and the textsmith, you will see that they have different flavours of bookmarks. At the moment, the two cannot out of the box use the same language. We may, however, consider adding such a feature if a number of users express their interest in that direction.

Otherwise enjoy your bookmarks whichever tool you are using to manage them, and thank you for your support and interest in these tools!

• Hande Lets Go
• Textsmith Terminal
• Scope
• Bookmark Management
• Dsl