I enjoyed presenting Hookmark to lawyers yesterday ( 2026-01-16) and interacting with them.
Here is one of the questions I received from @aelliott1285 that I said I’d follow up on here in the forum:
how robust is the scripting for get path, get name, get URL, etc? What is possible in terms of retrieving the file path/hookmark link?
Could Hookmark get and format the markdown link to a file in Finder, as well as that file’s corresponding Dropbox URL, by using Dropbox’s service menu actions? What does Dropbox show to Hookmark in Finder when right-clicking a file in the Dropbox folder in Finder?
My goal is to create a custom ‘super’ Copy Hookmark Markdown link that places a properly formatted piece of text with the markdown hook link and the Dropbox URL into the clipboard.
This would let me paste it into a Daylite note, email, .txt, or .rtf file, producing a two-bullet-point output. The user could then select the markdown link if on a Mac or choose to click the Dropbox URL, which would open in a web browser and lead to the same file.
This functionality is essential for our workflow, ensuring compatibility across iOS, macOS, and various apps.
Luc, I’m thinking of something similar to selecting multiple files in Finder, right-clicking, and selecting Copy all Hook Links, which outputs a nicely formatted list of all the hook links for easy pasting.I would like to script something similar that grabs both the Hookmark link and the Dropbox URL, formats them for pasting, and makes them look nice. The user could then click the Hookmark link to open that file in Finder, or open it directly based on their settings.
ALTERNATIVELY, you would also have the Dropbox URL below the Hook Link and the ability to open that file in a browser. This would be very helpful when using iOS or other web apps, etc.
I think the bottom line is that the user wants Hookmark’s bookmarks (created with Copy Link, Copy As Markdown Link, Copy As Universal Link, Copy as Universal Markdown Link, Hook to Copied Link and Add Bookmark) to return both a hook://file URL and a Dropbox URL.
On the one hand, we couldn’t modify the behavior of Hookmark to change “get address” scripts to return two links.
- it would affect the get address script not only of Finder, but of every app that transacts in files (such as BBEdit).
- Hookmark is not setup to return two different links when it creates links.
Copy All Hooked Linksis a different beast. - It depends on Dropbox having an API we can leverage. I don’t know if that is possible yet.
However, we have long wanted internally to allow one resource to have more than one address (URL). For example, when you invoke Hookmark in DEVONthink indexed folder, Hookmark returns a x-devonthink-item link. However if one has hooked a file in that indexed folder one would typically want said hooks to be visible also in the context of DEVONthink, without committing Hookmark in DEVONthink to transact primarily in hook://file URLs.
On the other hand, the good news is that there is likely a way to achieve the customer’s requirement: by using AppleScript or Shortcuts. Hookmark supports both. So if Dropbox can be automated to get the Dropbox https:// URL for a file, it should be quite feasible to automate this. I.e., it depends on what is possible with Dropbox app automation-wise.