Welcome to the Hook Productivity blog!
There’s a little dance that you learn to get around iPhones that lack a Home button. Similarly, when you learn to use Hook, you learn a new “dance” to navigate around resources—i.e., content on your Mac, in the cloud, in a VCS (version control system, like Git), or on the web. So, learning to use a Mac with Hook is as easy as learning to use an iPhone with Face ID after having used iPhones with a Home button for years.
Basically,
- In the context of any resource you can start linking items, whether via the Hook window or menu bar icon.
- When a resource is linked to another with Hook, when you invoke the Hook window, you see linked items. From there, you can access linked items.
- You can also use the
Copy as Linkcommand to get a formatted URL which you can paste in any document/note, or use in “Link to Copied Address” to create a Hook link). - You can even share links to locally represented cloud and files (like Git), and emails.
Hook also has a few other facilities, like the following in the Hook window gear menu:
- “Reveal File in Finder”. This is self-explanatory.
- “Make Hook File” has many purposes. A more obscure one is to create a launcher abbreviation. As long as the folder(s) containing your Hook files is (are) indexed by your launcher, the Hook files will be treated as abbreviations by it. This is handier than using an alias because (a) Hook files are more robust than aliases; (b) Hook places Hook files in a central place, so they don’t clutter the current folder (often, perhaps usually, one doesn’t want an alias in the same directory as that which it references).
- “Copy a Search Link from Clipboard”. This is handy way to create a link that triggers a spotlight search. This allows you to link to documents that are not scriptable. You can also use it as a stem for any search link. Before Hook, there was no such thing as a search link, which you might call a Spotlight link.
All of these facilities build on your existing skills and knowledge, helping you quickly access information resources. In sum, Hook helps you to
- create efficiently,
- solve problems correctly,
- learn swiftly, and
- share your knowledge.
If you work in a team or have a spouse, why not share Hook with them? This will help them do better work. And you’ll be able to share knowledge together.