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Uses / My Setup

The Four-Letter Bookmarks Bar

By Wes Ellis4 min read

Part 7 of the thread Games and gear

THE SHORT VERSION4 points
  • My whole bookmarks bar is six folders, each a four-letter word in capitals: HOME, WORK, PLAY, CASH, GROW, MAKE.
  • Top level is shouting, second level is talking. One layer of Title Case subfolders holds the actual links.
  • The four-letter rule forces you to decide what a category is, and if something fits none of the six, you probably don't need it.
  • Setup takes minutes. The real work is sorting the pile once, then saving straight into a folder every time after.

Most bookmarks bars I see look like a junk drawer somebody glued to the top of the browser. A dozen favicons with no labels, three folders called "New folder", a link to a recipe from 2019. You can't find anything, so you search for it again, so you bookmark it again. The cycle continues.

Mine has six folders on it. Each one is a single word, four letters long, in capitals:

HOME   WORK   PLAY   CASH   GROW   MAKE

That's the whole bar. It's a little silly. It also works.

What goes where

Each folder is a broad area of life, and each one is a word you could say out loud without explaining it:

Folder What lives in it
HOME The house and the family stuff
WORK Web design, GitHub, and the tools I build things with
PLAY Gaming and downloads
CASH Anything to do with money
GROW Cooking and fitness. Getting better at things, basically.
MAKE The creative side: writing and music

Inside each one, subfolders use normal Title Case, and the links live in those. So it ends up looking something like this:

WORK
├── Web Design
├── GitHub
└── ...
MAKE
├── Writing
├── Music
└── ...

Top level is shouting, second level is talking. You always know which layer you're on.

Why the four-letter rule works

It fits. Six short words take up a fraction of the bar, even on a laptop screen, with room left over. Nothing gets pushed into that little overflow chevron on the right where bookmarks go to die.

It's easy to scan. Six labels in all caps, each four letters, read almost like a row of buttons on a piece of hardware. Your eye doesn't have to hunt, and after a week your hand knows where CASH is without looking.

It forces a decision. This is the real trick. When a word has to be four letters, you can't make a folder called "Stuff To Look At Later" or "Misc 2". You have to decide what the category is. And if something doesn't fit any of the six, that's usually a sign it doesn't need saving at all.

It's a little bit fun. Finding a four-letter word that actually means what you want is a tiny puzzle.

Setting it up

Every major browser can do this in a few minutes.

Tip

Chrome, Edge and Firefox all toggle the bookmarks bar with Ctrl+Shift+B (Cmd+Shift+B on a Mac), and all three have a bookmark manager where dragging things around is much easier than doing it on the bar itself.

  1. Pick your six words first. Write them down before touching the browser. Areas of your life, not projects. Projects end; areas don't.
  2. Make the six folders directly on the bookmarks bar, in the order you want them to appear. Left to right is priority order, so put the one you open most on the left.
  3. Dump everything else into a holding folder. Don't sort it on the bar. Make one temporary folder somewhere out of sight and move every existing bookmark in there.
  4. Sort the pile into the six. Open the bookmark manager, and drag things into the right folder, making Title Case subfolders as you go. Anything dead, duplicated, or embarrassing gets deleted. Be ruthless.
  5. Delete the holding folder once it's empty. It's not a new home for stragglers.

Try this

Four letters doesn't have to mean these four-letter words, either. FOOD, TRIP, READ, CODE, SHOP... whatever maps to your life. The only rules are four letters and all caps.

Keeping it tidy

Any system rots if you let it. A few habits keep this one honest:

  • Bookmark straight into a folder. When you save something, pick the subfolder right then. Chrome, Edge and Firefox all let you choose the folder in the little save dialog. It takes two seconds, and it's the difference between a system and a pile.
  • No loose links on the bar. The moment you let one favicon sit next to the folders "just for now", you've lost.
  • Keep subfolders shallow. One level of Title Case subfolders is plenty. If a subfolder wants its own subfolders, it's probably trying to become a seventh top-level word, and you should think about whether it deserves one.
  • Do a quick sweep now and then. Open one folder, click through anything you don't recognize, and delete the dead ones. Link rot is real, and it's oddly satisfying to clean up.

It's not a productivity system. There's no app, no tags, no methodology with a trademark. It's six words on a bar. But I find what I'm looking for on the first try, and that's all I ever wanted from bookmarks.

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