Drag and Drop Linking: One Item at a Time

You can easily hook (link) items together by dragging and dropping them onto Hookmark’s menu bar icon. Here we describe how to hook (link) items together by dropping one item at a time on the menu bar icon.

  1. Drag a file onto the Hookmark menu bar icon. The drop zone will split into two, revealing a new drop zone.
  2. Drag a different file onto the Hookmark menu bar icon.

And presto! The two files are now bidirectionally linked! You’ll get a notification to this effect, which you can turn off in macOS System Preferences > Notifications.

Now, the next time you invoke the Hookmark window (using ⌘⇧spacebar) on one file, you will see the other file. So you can instantly navigate between them.

Watch how easy it is to “hook” items together by dragging and dropping them onto Hookmark’s menu bar icon:

Changing your mind while linking

You can change your mind while linking. There are two ways to do it.

  1. You can drop a different item directly onto the top drop zone. This replaces the drop zone content, but does not link the item. (Drop zones are not accumulators, meaning they do not accumulate content).
  2. After dropping the first item onto the menu bar icon, an “x” appears, which (when clicked) empties the top drop zone, and merges it with the bottom zone (basically, leaving a single, big drop zone).

If this sounds complicated, just experiment, or watch videos. There’s no danger in linking items. Links can easily be deleted. And even spurious links don’t cause problems.

After linking items…

After you hook items together with the menu bar icon, the menu bar window returns to its initial state of a single, empty drop zone. There’s no “undo” (yet). No need to panic here: links are harmless. And you can easily find linked items using Spotlight, if they are tagged (which is an option).

Works with many kinds of linkable items!

This does not merely work with files, it also works with many kinds of linkable items. Emails, web pages, OmniFocus tasks, and many, many more types. For example:

  1. Drag a web address from Safari (or almost any other browser) and drop it onto the menu bar icon.
  2. Drag an email message from Mail, MailMate or Airmail and drop it onto the menu bar icon.

Again, presto, the web page and mail message are linked.

Now, the next time you invoke the Hookmark window (using ⌘⇧spacebar) on one file, you will see the other file. So you can instantly navigate between them.

You can also drag and drop multiple items together to link them all at once or in two steps. See mesh linking.