General Preferences Tab

You can control the following behavior of Hookmark on the General tab:

1. “Hooked” indicator in menu bar icon

If Show current item's number of hooks in menu bar icon is enabled, then Hookmark’s menu bar icon will change dynamically to reflect whether the currently open or selected item is hooked to anything. It will do this regardless of whether Hookmark’s contextual window is open.

This means you don’t need to open the Hookmark window to see whether an item is hooked to something.

See Menu bar icon badge showing number of links to the current item for more information.

2. The effect of clicking Hookmark’s menu bar icon

You can configure whether clicking Hookmark’s menu bar icon shows:

Regardless of this setting, if you hold the option key down while clicking Hookmark’s menu bar icon, the menu bar window will appear.

3. Hookmark Context Window (appearance and hiding)

You can configure several aspects of the Hookmark (contextual) Window itself.

3.1 Hide Hookmark context window after copying links (checkbox)

If this is checked, then after you use Copy Link, Copy Markdown Link, or Hook to Copied Link), the Hookmark context window will remain visible. By default, this setting is unchecked.

Advanced users will prefer to disable this setting.

Even if this is disabled, Hookmark will automatically disappear if you open an item through Hookmark or use the ESC key — as macOS Spotlight® and launchers like Alfred and LaunchBar do.

Advanced users will normally enable this (auto-hiding).

3.2 Toolbar buttons

You can configure whether Hookmark shows any or all of the following buttons in its toolbar:

4. Links: hook://file/ URL-handling, notifications, and export/import

You can configure the following three aspects of Hookmark’s linking:

4.1. Reveal hook://file link targets in Finder

When you use Copy Link on a file, Hookmark creates a link containing a hook://file URL. You can paste that hook://file// URL anywhere. Similarly, invoking Make Hookmark File on a selection in the Finder creates a .hook file that contains a hook://file// URL.

The Reveal hook://file link targets in Finder option determines what happens when you click on such hook://file// links. The choices are:

  • to reveal the target of the link (the file) in Finder; or
  • open the target file.

NB: this preference does not affect what happens when you:

  1. Access files via Hookmark’s contextual window. If you double-click (or press the Return key on) a hooked file, Recent item, Pinned item, or Search, Hookmark will necessarily open that file regardless of this setting.
  2. Open .hook files that contain a link to another type of resource than files, such as web pages. That is because .hook files can contain any link. And of course, you can’t reveal remote web pages in Finder 🙂 .

4.2 Playing menu bar icon linking sounds

This checkbox controls whether sounds are played when you create links with Hookmark

By default, Hookmark issues macOS notifications when you create links. You can disable and configure Notifications in the macOS Apple menu > System Preferences > Notifications pane. See Apple’s documentation on notifications.

4.3. Export and Import of link data (Advanced feature)

Hookmark’s General Preferences tab contains an Export button and an Import button. These buttons are provided as one of several alternative means of backing up and restoring Hookmark links. For more information see this web page. See also instructions on migrating Hookmark between Macs.

In the unlikely event that Hookmark data become corrupted, you can import previously exported links. This process may detect and remove inconsistent data. You can also use the export/import buttons to compact the Hookmark link database. When you export Hookmark links, Hookmark does not include links to files that are not currently mounted / reachable. This effectively purges links to files that have been deleted or on media that you no longer use. However, this leads to the following caution.

  1. You need to ensure that all mobile /removable directories, to which you have links that you wish to preserve, are connected at the time of both exporting and importing. That includes version control system folders, shared folders (Dropbox folders, etc.), and removable media (external drives, disk images, etc.) Hookmark will drop the disconnected info. This is a way of paring down Hookmark’s database to exclude files that are no longer reachable.
  2. Please also ensure that Spotlight is indexing the folder containing files to which hook://file/ links point.

5. Hookmark Folder: where it is stored

At the bottom of Hookmark’s General Preferences tab, you can choose where Hookmark creates its (Hookmark) folder. By default, Hookmark creates it in ~/Documents.

The Hookmark folder contains:

Please note that this command will not move your prior Hookmark folder’s contents; it simply chooses a new folder.

Restart Hookmark in order for changes to the Hookmark Folder setting to take full effect.