Quite Uncalled For

Hookmark Is Great

Hookmark is a rather wonderful app that allows you to link together anything on your Mac or beyond.

• Connect a web page to your notes on the topic.
• Connect your expenses spreadsheet to your receipt photos.
• Create a new TODO that links to a birthday present idea on Amazon.

The connections (or hooks) it creates are maintained in it’s own database (SQLite) but can also be pasted into documents using the native URL scheme of the inked items or it’s own extension scheme. Behind the scenes It’s all elegantly sitting atop a pile of AppleScript glue for an impressively large set of supported applications.

Connecting stuff is just a matter of opening Thing 1, typing a hookmark shortcut, opening Thing 2 and typing another hookmark shortcut. Voila, they’re “hooked”.

Open a file or web page and a toolbar icon shows you that it’s connected and allows you to see what it’s connected to. It also somehow copes with files moving and being renamed under its feet.

It’s all far less complicated than it sounds and it’s easy to not quite get it until you’ve tried it – it’s astonishingly useful.

So why write my own?

Cost

I used Hookmark while I was working but the pricing model leaves me in the twilight zone between the Standard and Pro plans. While it’s not a subscription it functionally is: you buy it and you get a year of updates, but you can use it forever after that. Great, but it’ll probably stop working pretty fast. It’s heavily dependent on the maintained app binding library and OS features so you’re potentially just one OS or app update away from doom.

Excess and Duplicated Features

I never really needed the database of everything I ever linked, since the vast majority of the time I was linking between things that could maintain a link themselves in the content. Like a note (an Obsidian markdown file) would naturally contain a link to a web page or OmniFocus task. The task could easily have a link back to the note using the Obsidian URL scheme (or an extension of it).

I keep most of my notes and files in Obsidian which has really good link management itself. When looking at a file it shows what the file connects to and from, updating the links if you move or rename it.

Lock In

I’m also slightly paranoid about relying on what is essentially proprietary metadata of my content, I’d rather links were in the files themselves as part of the content. So it doesn’t matter how the files got connected, they stay connected without extra tooling.

And Because I Want To

What can I say, I’m a nerd, this is fun!

So What Next

I’m imagining some concoction of new MacOS Tahoe Spotlight features, Siri Shortcuts, and probably either Keyboard Maestro or Alfred workflows.

Because let’s be honest, there’s no such thing as too complicated.