Using Hookmark With Fastmarks

Fastmarks is a Mac app for rapidly searching and opening your bookmarks. It is developed by retina studio, led by Tyler Hall. It’s 100% keyboard-driven. No mouse needed. Lightning fast!

Originally, Fastmarks was designed only to open web bookmarks. However, Fastmarks now enables you to search bookmarks in Hookmark. Given that Hookmark can bookmark any item that has a URL, Fastmarks can be used to search all kinds of bookmarks!

This means you can use Fastmarks to search for anything you’ve bookmarked in Hookmark, such as:

  • files
  • emails
  • tasks (e.g., in OmniFocus, Things, or Todoist)
  • Obsidian notes
  • DEVONthink items
  • and much, much more

Basically: if the content is in a URL-friendly app and you’ve touched it with Hookmark, you can find it in Fastmarks!

Enable Hookmark in Fastmarks

In order to be able to find Hookmark’s bookmarks with Fastmarks, you only need to enable Hookmark in the Fastmarks preference panel:

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How to search for bookmarks in Fastmarks

To search bookmarks in Fastmarks, simply use the global keyboard shortcut that you’ve specified in Fastmarks’ preferences panel. By default it is ⌃] (control – right square bracket).

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How to add Hookmark’s bookmarks to Fastmarks

As long as you enable Hookmark in Fastmarks, Fastmarks will automatically give you access to Hookmark’s bookmarks. You don’t need to add bookmarks manually to Fastmarks.

Fastmarks relies on Hookmark’s AppleScript API to get Hookmark’s bookmarks. It does that at search time. As Hookmark accumulates bookmarks, Fastmarks immediately has access to them.

Create custom bookmarks in Fastmarks with Hookmark

You can nevertheless manually add bookmarks to Fastmarks using Fastmarks’ Edit Custom Bookmarks... command. Hookmark is helpful here too, because it has a very convenient way of getting bookmarks to almost anything (files, tasks, emails, etc.)

You would use Hookmark to copy the URL of the bookmark, and paste it manually in Fastmarks using its Edit Custom Bookmarks...

For example, you can:

  1. Select a folder, such as your ~/Documents folder.
  2. Use Hookmark’s Copy Markdown Link command.
  3. Invoke Fastmarks’ Edit Custom Bookmarks...
  4. Paste the link.
  5. Edit the link to make it compatible with the Fastmarks format.

Using Fastmarks’ manual method makes the bookmarks available even if you turn off Fastmarks’ Hookmark integration. The general process is explained here: Create New Bookmarks.

Hooking items in Fastmarks

Because Fastmarks is a “background” app (not visible in macOS App Switcher), there’s no way to invoke Hookmark in Fastmarks. Therefore you can’t directly hook items together in Fastmarks.

To invoke Hookmark on a bookmark that you’ve found in Fastmarks, simply open that bookmark from Fastmarks and then invoke Hookmark.

Similarly, the Hook to New command is not directly invokable in Fastmarks. However, whenever you use Hook to New to create any item, Hookmark’s bookmarks to the items become available in Fastmarks.

Screencast and help page on Using Hookmark With Fastmarks

Check out this screencast and help page on Using Hookmark With Fastmarks published on the Retina Studio website.

See also