 Hey everybody, welcome back to the channel. Today, we're gonna talk a little bit about a little application called Buku. I think that's how you pronounce it. I'm not exactly sure. It doesn't matter. I'm gonna call it Buku because that's what it looks like. The idea behind Buku is browser-independent bookmarks. So, let's talk first a little bit about why you would want browser-independent bookmarks. So, it's a good idea if you move between browsers a lot. It's a good idea if you're worried about privacy and don't really want the browser you're using to know all of your bookmarks. Similarly, it's a good idea because you can control your bookmarks and be more organized. That last one's a little untrue. I'll talk a little bit about that later. But browser-independent bookmarks also allow you to transfer between browsers, but also transfer between computers really easily because you have the full. There's not an understanding with a browser you can export your bookmarks to like a XML or HTML file or whatever and transfer it over manually or sync it via Dropbox or PCloud or whatever. But this way, you have literally a file that is associated with this program that you can just install on another computer, point at the program, add that file and you're set up with the same system you have on your first computer and that's really good. And I've been using this now for, I don't know, maybe two months now and I'm really very impressed with it. It does have some quirks, I guess you'd have to say. It's definitely going to change your workflow. I found myself visiting bookmarks a little bit less now than I did before, mainly because it's taking some time to work this process into my muscle memory and it's a, like I said, it's a process. So first, let me open up a browser here and show you what my bookmarks used to look like. So if we could press Control B here and these are my bookmarks here. I was always very, very organized, had them in folders and stuff. They're very, where there's both being categorized and they're all tagged with the Firefox tagging system and it's great. But there are also a ton of these things that I just don't, I mean, this FOSS stuff thing has just kind of been developed into a catch all thing for all FOSS related stuff and the same thing with tools here and there's apps to look at. I have a whole bunch of things in here and that's a whole bunch of stuff from my fan fiction stuff and technology websites and YouTube and all that stuff. I have it all, it was kind of a mess. And because I'm one of those weird people who go through and want to theme Firefox all the time, the bookmarks menu kind of got in the way. So Firefox looks a lot cleaner like this than it does with that menu out and I understand you can put the menu up here, show bookmarks bar. Yeah, I mean, this is what it looks like up here and I had that thing go away. That's pretty clean. But it also, it ruins the aesthetic of having a one line Firefox thing. This is just one line is awesome. It's the way I prefer it. At one point I had them along the side and that one line, it was, and that looked pretty cool too. But like I said, I'll switch back and forth between browsers. So I really kind of wanted to control over my bookmarks file. Something that was transferable between browsers, something that I could control, something that was easy to add things to. And so Brodie Robinson, I think that's his name, he's another YouTuber that does Linux. He calls himself Discount Luke, which I find hilarious. He did a video on Buku not too long ago. And I decided, I'm gonna give this a try. And since then, I've been using it. So what does Buku actually look like? So I have this bound to a key binding for Rofi. So I used to mod B and these are my bookmarks. And I don't have all my bookmarks in here. So all that stuff you saw, it was all FOSS related stuff. I don't have any of that stuff in here because it's just, that's just stuff I would, I can still get to that stuff by going to the regular bookmarks menu. These are the things that I visit all the time. You know, and it's just, as a matter of fact, I only have 49 bookmarks. And it's just really easy. If I wanna visit one of these, I just, you know, I can just, so let's just say I wanted to visit the Verge. I just type it in. I can also do, I can also type that number if I have that number memorized, which I don't. You know, I can just type in the Verge or that number or whatever. And that's really great. It's very, you know, simple. It works with the menu or Rofi. So let's go ahead and go to a terminal here and take a look at what the menu or Buku actually looks like. And it's about 5,000 lines of code. And I believe that this is written in Python. I might be, yeah, it's written in Python. So yeah, I'm getting to know what Python looks like with that. Oh yeah. Anyways, it's written in Python and about 5,000 words code. And I don't understand a damn line of this really. Some of the things look familiar that from my time with Qtile. And I'm gonna be, I'm gonna try to dive into this a little bit you know, in my own time because I really wanna try to get, because when I go through and say I wanted to open up a bookmark, say I wanted to open it up, I don't know, VGN here is just for my football team. See, it opens up in a new browser. And I don't, or a new tab. And I don't always want it to open up in a new tab. I'd love to be able to have that set so I can kind of alter it, you know, with a different key binding. I'm not quite sure how to do that. It's not something that Buku can do. Buku can do, sounds like a 70 song. But I'd love to be able to do that. So I'm gonna dive into the code a little bit and see if I can figure out how to do that. But really what we wanna look at here is Buku to help. Now there's tons of stuff you can do here. So if you wanna add a bookmark, you do it with the dash A flag. You can update with the dash U, dash W right opens an editor. So if I do one Buku dash W, that brings me here. Then I just add the URL, add the title of the URL, add tags. Now what's great is if you use the, if you use the D menu helper or whatever for this, you can set it up so that it can search for tags instead of the titles or stuff. Now if you look, there's one, oops. So there's one of these flags here. Let's see here. Yeah, format. If you search by with the dash F thing, when you do a search, it will allow you to choose what you wanna search. The N1 will search for the URL, and two URL in the tag, URL title, and four was the URL in the title and the tag and so on and so forth. So I have a script here, cd slash users, search local slash bin. I think it's called, I think it's called Buku D menu, yeah. So then Buku D menu. And this is basically just one line of code. This right here just checks to make sure Buku's installed. And then there's just one line. So it runs Buku with the P flag and the F flag and the number three. So this basically searches for the title and the tag, I believe. And then it formats it in a certain way, feeds it into Rofi in the D menu style. And labels it bookmarks. It cuts out some spaces. And then this argument here basically just tells you if it's empty to open up whatever your selection is. And that's just one line. And this started off as a D menu script. So I just replaced Rofi with D menu. But that's basically all that is. Now this doesn't come with Buku. You have to download this separately. I put a link to D menu run in the show notes description, the show notes description, the video description. You can tell I was doing a podcast yesterday. But basically that's all it does. It just opens up this and uses your Rofi or D menu theme or whatever you do. Because I prefer Rofi, so this is what it looks like. My D menu is themed, but I just don't use it. I'm actually kind of shocked that I still have D menu actually installed. But I don't think that DWM will actually run without D menu installed. So that's just completely beside the point. So if we go back to here and clear this out and do Buku. Buku, I can't type help again. There's tons of different things you can do. So once you get the W that you can delete them, the based on the ID, so each. So if I, let me, one of these things here will list out the one, list out the bookmarks that I have, which, okay, so I will talk about AI here in a second. Because you can import your bookmarks from your browser. It did not work for me. I'm not sure why. I think it's because I had too many folders, but that's possible. One of these things here, I actually list out the things that I have. What if I just type in Buku? Oh, let's see here. Do, do, do, do, do. This apparently always, I never used Buku in the terminal. So I'm not exactly sure how to do it, but I guess it doesn't really matter. You can go through and search it. I don't know why you'd want to use Buku in the terminal actually. I mean, you use the terminal to add your bookmarks and that's what I did. But after that, you almost have to have something with the menu or Rofi. Because why would you want to, every time you open up a bookmarks, you know, you know, open up a, like, two, and I just opened up. Apparently this has the idea of two, which I didn't even know. Like I said, I don't know why you'd want to open up a terminal every time you want to do Buku dash O, three. You know, that just opens up Tumblr. You know, I mean, why would you want to do that every single time you open up? So you almost have to have, oops, that's the wrong one, you know, something with Rofi or DMN. So let's talk, so basically in a nutshell, that's what Buku is. I'm not gonna show you how to add, you know, a bookmark or stuff. It's all there in the help documentation. And it's really easy. Just Buku dash W and didn't fill out the information. You know, that's really all it is. Some things that I don't like about Buku. So in the beginning, I told you how it kind of made me not visit my bookmarks nearly as much. And that's the truth, because I used to, I mean, when they were their front and center in my, you know, Firefox, you know, I was visiting them all the time. And when I first started using Buku, I actually kind of didn't use them as much because you kind of have to remember that they're there. You know, so I always have to remember, not only that, you know, Buku is there, but I also have to remember, you know, say I wanted something from AO3, which is, you know, all these here. You know, I have to remember what to search for. I have to, so I want, if I want to, want something tech, as you can see, this doesn't actually, this just searches the title. So it only shows me, you know, like things that have tech in the name. So it's a little, because that, because it's kind of buried, it's not front and center, I had to retrain my muscle memory, but also because it's not easy to search through something outside of the terminal. So if you want to search for something, you know, via tag or ID or whatever, you know, it's really easy to do so in the terminal using those flags, but you would have to write a Rofi or D manuscript if you want to search through tags, you know, you know, using Rofi or D menu, and that's kind of a pain in the ass, and it just is. So it's kind of weird. It's kind of weird that this isn't just a D menu script to begin with, or a Rofi script to begin with, that you have to kind of add it into Rofi. It's also, I don't, I already talked about how it opens up a new tab. So a lot of times when I'm switching between bookmarks, I'll end up like this. I have like five or six tabs open because every time I open up a new bookmark or switch between bookmarks, it opens up a new tab. And I don't really want that. It's kind of a, it's kind of terrible. So I mean, there are some, like I said, there's some quirks that you kind of have to get used to, but I really like the fact that I have, you know, a file somewhere on my computer. I think it's in .boku, I think. I could be wrong. .config.boku, I can't remember. But there's a file on my computer that I can copy to a phone drive or send via Dropbox or whatever to my laptop. And all of a sudden I have all my bookmarks there without having to trust Firefox or Google Chrome to sync them and not steal my data. That's what really impresses me about Boku. And it's something that will, I've gotten used to it now. And I'm going to write that script where I can search via tag and stuff. Cause I think that that'd be really useful cause I have all of the bookmarks that I entered. I gave a whole bunch of tags like fan fiction or technology or videos or whatever. So I gave them all tags, but you can't really search for those the way I have it set up. So that's probably one of my next things that I'm going to do is write a Rofi script where that will go through. Cause it will not be hard. If I, a seeding to this here and then to here, all I'd have to do is change this beginning thing here to search. Instead of search for title, I'd have to search for tabs. So if I do Boku help and go here to the F, the F one, where is F, F, F, F, F, F, past it, past it, past it. It's a, these are alphabetical order. I don't know alphabetical order, but they should be. So if I do, right now I'm doing three, I'm doing title. If I change that to two, or if I changed it to five, that would allow when I do that search, it would search for not only the title, but also anything that matched a tag, which would be cool. So if I typed in tech, I would get all the things that I tagged tech and that's something that I'm going to do. I'm not sure. I might be able to actually just change that now. So if I change this to, I said five. So if we do, actually I'm going to sudo. This is, oops, I can't use my alias here. I got to do NZM. We just go down here and change just five, change letter five. Now if I do D, oops. See it's going to put all the tags now here. So if I type in tech, it'll actually give me everything that I've typed tech or gave the tech tag to. So I've done Verge and the OMG Ubuntu and Android Central and all these things. Whereas before, if you remember, it just showed me an ant tech in ours, Technica. So that's really cool. I think I'm going to go ahead and leave it like that. That way I can just type in fan fiction and that gives me all my fan fiction stuff no matter what site I've been using. So that's really cool. And that was how easy that is. Like I said, in the description, I will go through and link to Buku. So you can find that. It's on a GitHub page. It's very easy to install. It's in the AUR, I believe. It's also, you can also make, it's a very like a buildable package. You can just make install it. So you can compile it yourself. And I will also link to D menu, Buku dash D menu. That is just that one line of code that I just changed. That's literally all it is. There's another D menu script out there called Buku underscore run. It does not work. It's like 40, 50 lines of code. And it's entirely too complicated. Literally that D menu, Buku D menu, just that one line of code is fantastic. It doesn't even need to be a program. It could just be something that you copy and paste into your like SXHKD file and run it like that. I mean, if you didn't want to put a script together. I mean, so it's even a script, even a script at that point is kind of unnecessary. So that is Buku. Let me know if you find Buku interesting by leaving a comment in the comment section where else would you leave a comment? You can also support the channel by going to patreon.com slash linuxcast following us on Twitter at the linuxcast. Or me, I'm personally on Twitter at MTWB. You can also do the thing that everybody should do is hit the subscribe button and also hit the thumbs up button because those really do help the channel. We've been, I wouldn't say we've been growing by leaps and bounds, but we're definitely getting people watching the videos which I really do appreciate. So thank you for everybody who's watching and we'll see you next time.