According to my 2s rule of cognitive productivity, 80% of the information you retrieve on any given day needs to take you at most 2 seconds to retrieve. The greater the %, the better.
The problem is that using macOS unadorned is often an inefficient way to access your files, making it impossible to satisfy the 2s rule. Spotlight, launchers, rummaging through folders and even using Finder aliases or Finder tags just don’t cut it, particularly if you need to access files that reside in different folders — let alone in cloud-synced folders.
The same goes for the web; relying on search engines is fine for accessing a webpage once. But if you need to access the same page multiple times, you may be better off using a bookmark, as long as you have a good bookmark manager.
Enter Hookmark’s file URLs (of the form hook://file), which allow you to link to files. If you recall Hookmark’s links to emails (of the form hook://email/), then you’ve probably noticed the pattern in the URL schemes Hookmark defines, namely that there is a sub-scheme after hook://.
We’ve published a new help page on Hookmark’s file links. It delves into the details of these links, including:
- the components of
hook://file/URLs, - how to create Hookmark file links,
- what happens when you activate Hookmark’s file links,
- that Hookmark file links are shareable (assuming the recipient has access to a copy of the file on Mac),
- why file links are better than Finder aliases,
- how to exclude some folders from Hookmark’s initial resolution of its file links and
- how Hookmark links differ from Hookmark files.
We are on a mission to ensure that
Hookmark’s file links and email links are two of several types of links Hookmark invented to help us accomplish our mission:
Hookmark supplies the missing links to your workflows.
Please let us know below whether you have comments or questions about Hookmark files links.