Introduce concept of "named contexts" for more streamlined hooking

Hookmark Feature Requests
1

This app introduces some really great concepts, but is missing some critical features.
I absolutely love the concept of “hooking” things together, but the current flows for doing so seem awkward.

My normal workflow is that I’m usually focused on a single tasks/context for 30 - 120 minutes. During that time I occasionally switch contexts and look at something else and come back. While in a context I want to quickly hook things together in a way thats associated with that context.

Contexts:
Contexts are essentially named hook groups. They could be thematic in someway, but should basically just be a text string. Maybe that string is “Feature ABC for app” or “My Book - Chapter 5” or “Employee A Review”

Two Keyboard Commands are necessary

Hook to Current Context Command:
While I am in a given context I want to be able to hook together the various things I’m working on without switching away or thinking much. Ideally this is just a single keystroke. This would hook the current browser tab/ app to the other links for this context.

Hook to Different Context Command:
This command would popup a small window that has a textbox and a short list of recent contexts. The textbox would allow you to search for existing contexts or add a new one. Once you’ve hit “Okay” in this window it will switch contexts and add a hook to the new context.

This adds a useful layer on top of the already powerful concepts in Hook.

2

I can see that would be useful, but equally, I can see the downsides too. The thing with hook is that over time you create hundreds and eventually thousands of hooks. By having them attached to files and other objects, the organisation of the hooks takes care of itself. You just need to find one file to be your entry point back to your hooks. However if you had contexts in the way you describe, you’d need a way or organise those contexts, which would eventually number hundreds too, meaning the interface would have to be very different and would involve the user having to organise them or search them to find what they need. Rather than being a linking tool it would be another app with another interface to work. So that would be a different approach entirely.

The way I use hook now is by having an OmniFocus project as a hub and all the hooks for that project attached to it. So if I want to switch from one set of hooks to another, I go to OmniFocus and choose another project. That might be an approach you could use as an alternative. You don’t need OmniFocus, you could just have text files in a folder named as the contexts you want and all the hooks attached to them. Then to switch from one set of files to another you just need to select whichever file you want.