BrainTool - Beyond Bookmarks

Chanan Oren

2022-05-11

I've been looking for a replacement for Tabs Outliner for a while. After spending a few hours with BrainTool, it looks promising.

Everett Nelson

2022-05-07

Here I swim (now instead of sinking) in DaTa! I have earnestly, desperately tried a couple of dozen different Tab Outliners, Iconifiers, and Managers without achieving ONE MAIN GOAL: To Outline and thus hide masses (literally 1,000's) of web page links into a hierarchical structure. None of the Browsers (yes, I've used them all too) have hierarchical tab management beyond tab-grouping and that somehow easily is lost with browser restarts. I liked Vivaldi fairly well and it almost makes the grade, but does not consistently retain Named Groups. Furthermore there's only one level of Group Hierarchy available. Currently, I'm running the Brave Browser, which I appreciate for privacy and speed, but it's just basic tabs like most of the other browsers.
BrainTool has a high probability of actually doing what the other extensions promise to turn the Insatiable Information Beast into compartment data. It does so WITHOUT INFO-GRABBING and merchandising my life. The Data is kept locally by default unless I elect to have it placed online. Thanks BrainTool for not being grabby! BrainTool also goes the next step and enables not just Web Page Hierarchies, but ToDo Lists, Scratch Lists, and other types of Action Items. This makes sense, because the purpose of knowing something is to then Do Something!
BrainTool is just getting started, so there are some items that can be made more efficient, which I'll be commenting about on their Blog; however, I think they've got the Core Things on target: Honoring my privacy, Enabling hierarchical Outlining so to hide and reveal Data on Demand, and a certain simplicity to the interface. Thanks BrainTool. This adolescent is already ahead of many older peers.

Patrick Brennan

2022-05-05

I have been using Org-Mode as my daily driver for many years, and it has always been a stumbling block that integration between my browser and my Org files was missing. Tabs Outliner was a big help, but BrainTool is really the thing I was looking for - bidirectional communication between Org and the browser is a big jump in the usefulness and productivity I already wrest out of these tools. Bravo!

Stefan More

2022-05-04

I like the idea of a plugin that helps me to manage a large amount of bookmarks and open tabs.

But what I especially like is that it uses org-mode as storage format. On one hand, this makes my date interoperable and does not lock it into a cloud. On the other hand, this enables me as a org-mode user to collect and annotate links directly in the browser and then organize and re-use in at other places.

As an academic, I often open a large amount of academic papers which I want to bookmark and work on later, which is something I can easily do with braintool, instead of increasing my open tabs count by 42 new tabs each day and never closing a single one. ;-)

Also, the upcoming features (see website) sound rather promising.

Joe Bogner

2022-04-21

I've been using BrainTool for six months and can't imagine going back to my old system. As someone who typically would have 100 tabs open, it's a relief to be able to save and record information for the tabs for future reference. The organization system clicks for me. I appreciate the plain text format as an occasional org mode user.

I have 194 items added and organized. It's convenient to open up an entire group of items related to a topic. The search is helpful to find a topic.

My only wish is for some way to bring similar functionality to android / phones in general. That would be killer. This extension has changed the way I browse the web on my desktop computer.