Bookmarks with ownCloud and Vimperator

I recently added the Bookmarks app to my ownCloud installation. This app keeps a simple list of bookmarks synced across my computers. The Bookmarks app provides a bookmarklet to add new bookmarks easily. But there is a problem with using the bookmarklet: I have to click on it! And therefore I have to display the bookmarks bar or search for the bookmarklet in the bookmarks menu. I don’t like both approaches for following reasons: The bookmark bar eats too much space on my small notebook screen and searching for the bookmarklet in the menu takes too long.

The solution to this problem involves the Firefox plugin “Vimperator”, another great piece of software. Vimperator rearranges or removes some UI components of Firefox, like the address bar and makes your Browser behave like the Vim text editor. In Vimperator one can execute JavaScript code with the :js command. This makes it possible to execute the JavaScript of the bookmarklet directly in Vimperator. So let’s define a function that adds a new bookmark to the Bookmarks app and map this function to a keypress in Vimperator.

This snippet of my .vimperatorrc creates a new key binding (A in normal mode), which overrides Vimperator’s default key binding for adding a new bookmark.

noremap A :js bmark_owncloud()<CR>

:js << EOF
function bmark_owncloud(){
    var bmark_title = encodeURIComponent(content.document.title);
    var bmark_url = encodeURIComponent(content.document.location);
    var window_features = 'left=' + ((window.screenX||window.screen.left) + 10) + ',top=' + ((window.screenY||window.screen.top) + 10) + ',height=500px,width=550px,resizable=1,alwaysRaised=1';
    var window_name = 'bkmk_popup';
    var owncloud_url = 'https://owncloud.example.com/index.php/apps/bookmarks/bookmarklet?output=popup&url=' + bmark_url + '&title=' + bmark_title;
    var new_window = window.open(owncloud_url, window_name, window_features);

    window.setTimeout(
        function(){
            new_window.focus()
        },
        300
    );
};
EOF

Now the only thing that is left to do, is to change the https://owncloud.example.com to your actual ownCloud installation and you are good to go!