Getting Started

hlg is primarily a bookmark manager, which means that its main aim is to link you to some other resource, identify the program to activate that resource and then stay out of your way.

You, thus start hlg in one of the following three ways:

  • Without an argument to launch the main home bookmark;

  • You pass to it the name of the bookmark you wish to open; or

  • You pass in a command-line option to either adjust its behavior or else to do some management task.

Launching hlg without arguments

Simply typing:

hlg

on the terminal will bring up a default bookmark. We refer to this bookmark as the main home bookmark, as its behavior is the same as the home page in a browser.

  • The home bookmark can be set at either category or global level;

  • It is set at the global level in your configuration file in the "home" option.footonote:[The config.toml is the configuration file.]

  • It is set at category level in the appropriate bookmark file by simply appending the star to a bookmark name.

We will explore more on the subject of the home bookmarks in this page.

With the name of the bookmark

If you pass an argument to hlg, it has to be the name of the bookmark you want to visit. hlg works because of the bookmark file that contains the bookmark entries.

So make sure that the bookmark name you pass to hlg indeed exists:

  • The case used to save the bookmark is the same which is used to retrieve it;

  • For example, if you have got a bookmark called, "radios", you would pass it to hlg like this:

hlg radios

  • So "Radios" and "radios" are two different bookmarks, as hlg is case-sensitive.

Launching hlg with switches

You only launch hlg with command-line options for two reasons:

  1. To change the category which hlg works with; and

  2. To do some management tasks.

Any time you call hlg, it is operating in the default category. However, if you want to lookup bookmarks from another category, or even editing the bookmarks of another category, you simply call hlg with the name of the category.

For example, if you want to open a bookmark called “printers” from a category called “electronics”, you would do it like this:

hlg --category electronics printers

Some management tasks you can do with hlg include:

  • Editing your bookmarks with hlg -e which opens your default text editor for you to edit your bookmarks;

  • Editing your configurations with hlg -E

  • Check on assigned shortcut keys with hlg -k

  • and so on.

The rest of this guide gets into detail on how to perform some of these tasks. However,, doing a

hlg --help

will bring up a a usage guide on some of these switches.

We beleive that with this information, you are able to do everything with hlg

The rest of this guide is for the curious and the bookworm type, so feel free to discover more of the hidden gems and nuggets of the hlg program, which we honestly believe is the best and most powerful bookmark manager on the Unix system so far.