Interacting with your Firefox bookmarks and history from the command line

README.md

Firefox History and Bookmark Command Line Interface

These scripts use fzf and sqlite to efficiently query your firefox history and bookmarks. This is heavily inspired by a post from the creator of fzf: https://junegunn.kr/2015/04/browsing-chrome-history-with-fzf/. fzf allows you to select multiple items and the results returned will be the URLs.

What Does It Look Like?

Common Use Cases

Open a visited Web Page in a Browser

On Linux:

bhistory | xargs xdg-open

On macOS:

bhistory | xargs open

Copy the URLs of Selected Bookmarks into Your Clipboard

On Linux (with X11):

bbookmarks | xsel --clipboard -i

On macOS:

bbookmarks | pbcopy

Things to Consider

• The firefox profile is matched with a glob wildcard (*). This will probably break if you use more than one profile.
• The scripts are untested but should work on macOS; you need to change the profile path to ~/Library/Application\ Support/Firefox/Profiles

bbookmarks

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# query all of your firefox bookmarks by tag, title or url
# idea from https://junegunn.kr/2015/04/browsing-chrome-history-with-fzf/

sep='{::}'

# this is rarely locked but still, safety first
cp ~/.mozilla/firefox/*/weave/bookmarks.sqlite /tmp

sqlite3 -separator $sep /tmp/bookmarks.sqlite \
  '
  SELECT i.title, REPLACE(GROUP_CONCAT(t.tag), ",", ", "), u.url FROM items i
  JOIN urls u ON i.urlId = u.id
  LEFT OUTER JOIN tags t ON i.id = t.itemId
  GROUP BY t.itemId
  ' | 
awk -F $sep '{printf "%-'$cols's  \x1b[36m%-'$cols's  \x1b[m%-'$cols's\n", $1, $2, $3}' |
sed -E 's/\x1b\[[0-9;]+m  //g' |
fzf --ansi --multi |
grep -oP 'https?://.*$'

bhistory

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# query all of your firefox history by visit date, title or url
# idea from https://junegunn.kr/2015/04/browsing-chrome-history-with-fzf/

sep='{::}'

cp ~/.mozilla/firefox/*/places.sqlite /tmp

sqlite3 -separator $sep /tmp/places.sqlite \
  '
  SELECT datetime(v.visit_date/1000000, "unixepoch"), p.title, p.url FROM moz_places p
  JOIN moz_historyvisits v ON p.id = v.place_id
  GROUP BY p.url
  ORDER BY last_visit_date DESC
  ' |
awk -F $sep '{printf "%s  \x1b[36m%s  \x1b[m%s\n", $1, $2, $3}' |
sed -E 's/\x1b\[[0-9;]+m  //g' |
fzf --ansi --multi |
grep -oP 'https?://.*$'