Pikamark

Pikamark manual

Everything Pikamark does, in the order you'll meet it — from adding your first bookmark to workspaces and backups

What Pikamark is

Pikamark replaces your browser’s new-tab page with a board built from your real bookmarks. It reads the browser’s own bookmark tree, so anything you already have shows up immediately, and every change you make here is a change to the real bookmark — native editing, deleting, and account sync keep working alongside it.

Everything runs locally. There is no account, no server, and no network request for your data; settings and notes live in the browser’s local storage on this device. If that storage ever runs low, Pikamark says so rather than losing an edit.

Getting bookmarks in

  • Address-bar star / Ctrl+D (⌘+D) — the browser’s own “bookmark this page” is the fastest way, and it drops straight onto the board
  • The + button in the header — add one bookmark by title and URL. A URL with no scheme gets https:// added automatically
  • Paste links — press Ctrl+V (⌘+V) anywhere on the board (not in a text field) and Pikamark imports every http(s):// link it finds in the clipboard text
  • Drag links in from another app or window. Drop onto a folder to file them there; drop several at once onto empty space and they land in a new folder
  • Save open tabs as a folder — the labelled button in the header reads your current window’s tabs, skips internal pages, and files the rest in a new folder

Every import shows an undo toast for a few seconds in case it wasn’t what you meant

The board and columns

Your bookmarks bar’s top-level folders are spread across a set of columns. Set how many in Settings → Columns; the board otherwise never rearranges itself.

Moving things: drag a folder or bookmark by its handle. The layout stays frozen while you drag — a single accent line shows whether you’ll drop before, after, or nested inside the target, and nothing shifts around under the cursor. Hovering a closed folder briefly during a drag springs it open so you can drop inside.

Adding a column: drag an item onto the strip at either far edge of the board, or onto the gap between two columns — both only light up while you’re dragging. A folder’s ⋯ menu also has “move to previous/next column”.

Removing a column: “Delete column” appears only on a column that’s already empty, and never on the last one.

Folders nest to any depth. Bookmarks bar aside, other roots (Other Bookmarks, Mobile Bookmarks) sit in a separate section below the board and aren’t sorted into columns.

Board toolbar

An optional second bar, separate from the header, that gathers the things you reach for across the whole board: the workspace switcher, the pinned links, and quick buttons for Reminders, Trash, and its own settings. It stays in place when you enter gallery.

Settings → Toolbar sets where it sits:

  • Floating — pills hovering over the board (workspaces and pinned links along the bottom, the tools bottom-right)
  • Docked top or Docked bottom — a flat bar pinned to that edge
  • Off — no toolbar

Workspaces and Pinned links each pick their own home in Settings: the toolbar, the page header, or off. Turning the toolbar off takes the workspace switcher and pinned links with it, until you move them to the header or turn the toolbar back on.

Sessions

The board toolbar’s Sessions tool keeps named sets of open tabs you can bring back later. A session is a snapshot of one window’s tabs — their titles and URLs — and it lives entirely outside your bookmarks: saving one never adds a folder or touches the tree. Sessions are per-workspace.

  • Save current tabs — the button at the foot of the panel reads your current window, skips internal pages, and stores the rest under a name it fills in for you (change it before you confirm). Up to 100 tabs are kept; a busier window is saved to the first 100 and says so
  • Restore — click a session’s name to reopen every tab in it as background tabs, in the order they were saved. Your open tabs stay put — nothing is closed or replaced. Past 20 tabs it asks you to confirm first
  • Update re-captures the current window into that session; Rename changes its name in place; Delete removes it with an undo toast — deleted sessions don’t go to the trash
  • A workspace holds up to 30 sessions. At the limit, Save is off until you delete one

Sessions are part of Export and come back on import, so they move to another computer with the rest of your setup.

Folders and bookmarks

  • Open / close a folder card by clicking its header; the state is remembered per folder. On the very first load only the Bookmarks Bar starts open
  • Rename — top-level cards have a pencil button; bookmarks and nested folders use the Name and URL fields in the ⋯ menu. Changes save as you type, with no Save button
  • New folder — the header’s folder button, or a folder’s ⋯ menu → New folder in…. It’s created straight away with a default name; rename it afterwards
  • Open all — a folder’s ⋯ menu opens every link inside it as background tabs, asking you to confirm first past 15
  • Move to folder… — in any item’s ⋯ menu, moves that bookmark or folder into another folder in one step. The picker has its own search box and is fully keyboard-navigable, so it doubles as the way to file things without dragging
  • Delete — from the ⋯ menu. The item disappears at once and an undo toast gives you a few seconds to bring it back before it’s really removed

Bookmarks with no title show their site’s hostname. Missing favicons fall back to a coloured letter tile rather than a broken image.

Notes

Add a note from the header. A note is a card with a title and a free-text body, and it lives on the board next to your folders.

  • Checklist — a note’s ⋯ menu → Add checklist turns it into a checklist you can tick off; “Remove checklist” turns it back
  • Collapse a note to just its title when you don’t need the body
  • Notes can be favourited, colour-labelled, tagged, and dragged around exactly like folder cards

Sorting

The sort control in the header switches between Manual, Name, and Date added (Name and Date each have an ascending/descending toggle). On a narrow window it, the filter pill, and the create menu fold into one toolbar button.

Two things worth knowing:

  • Dragging bookmarks to reorder only works in Manual sort. In Name or Date sort a drag inside a folder appears to do nothing — switch to Manual first
  • Sorting only reorders items inside a folder or a search result. It never moves cards or columns on the board

The search box in the header filters the whole tree as you type — folder, bookmark, and note names, plus tag names. Open folder cards and the gallery also have their own “search this folder” box.

Press Enter or click the globe icon to send the query to your browser’s default search engine in a new tab. Pikamark can’t offer its own choice of engine — the browser only exposes the one you’ve configured.

Favourites, colour labels, and tags

  • Favourite — the star on any bookmark row or card. Show favourites only in the header’s filter pill hides everything else
  • Colour labels — a card’s ⋯ menu → Labels offers nine colours. Filter by colour from the header; click the active colour again (or double-click the control) to clear it
  • Tags — free-named, coloured, multiple per item. Assign them from the ⋯ menu → Tags, with autocomplete over tags you already use. Filter by tags from the header (selecting several narrows to items that have all of them). Rename, merge, and delete tags inline in that same filter popover

Favourite, colour, and tag filters combine with each other and with search

Discovery folders

Recently added and Most visited are optional smart folders, each switched on in Settings (capped at 8 items).

  • Most visited counts clicks inside Pikamark only — it is not your browser history
  • “Delete” on one of these folders just switches it back off in Settings. Nothing is removed, and there’s no undo toast because there’s nothing to undo
  • On the board and in gallery alike they now carry a real folder’s ⋯ menu — comment, reminder, pin, tags, favourite, colour label, “Open all”, and a search-this-folder box — alongside the turn-off that maps to the Settings switch. Their entries can be sent into a real folder with Move to folder…

An optional launcher for the handful of links you open constantly. Turn it on in Settings → Pinned links, where you also choose whether it lives in the board toolbar or the page header, then pin a bookmark from its ⋯ menu → Remember → Pin (up to 10). Pinned links are per-workspace.

Click a favicon to open it. The pencil button toggles edit mode, where each tile gets arrows to reorder and an ✕ to unpin; press Esc to leave edit mode. An empty pinned row suggests a bookmark worth pinning and points you at its Pin button.

Comments and reminders

Every bookmark, folder, and note can carry one of each, set from the ⋯ menu → Remember section or the small badges on the card.

  • Comment — a single free-text note attached to the item. Click the on-card speech-bubble badge to jump straight to it
  • Reminder — “Tomorrow” or a date and time you pick, with an optional message. “Tomorrow” lands at 09:00 local; a time you pick is kept. Reminders are checked only when you open a new tab, so one surfaces at the first new tab at or after its time, not on the minute. The toast offers Show (jump to the item), Complete (clear it), and Snooze 1 day. An unhandled reminder makes the card’s clock badge pulse

Reminders are deliberately throwaway: they’re not included in backups and they clear themselves once they’ve fired.

Selection mode

For acting on many items at once. The Multi-select button in the header turns it on (or press s); a checkbox appears on every bookmark and folder card.

  • Pick items by ticking the checkbox, clicking anywhere on a card, Shift-click for a range, or dragging across several. One selection spans the board and the gallery together
  • Act on the selection from the bar that appears: add a tag, favourite, colour label, hide, set a reminder, pin, Move to folder…, or delete — all at once
  • Select all visible takes everything the current filter and view show. Clear empties the selection; Done (or Esc) leaves the mode
  • Dragging cards to rearrange is off while selection mode is on

Gallery is a full-screen, tile-based way to browse. Enter it from the header (opens a “Home” view of your whole bookmarks bar) or from a folder’s ⋯ menu (opens that folder). Press Esc to step up one folder, and again from the top to leave; v toggles gallery and board directly.

  • Navigate with the breadcrumb trail or by clicking into folder tiles. Folder tiles preview their contents, and individual preview cells are clickable
  • Layout — choose compact/extended grid or list in Settings → Gallery layout. Gallery keeps its own column count, separate from the board
  • Notes sidebar — a panel listing every note, always available in gallery. Dock it left, right, or bottom; drag its edge to resize. Notes reordered here move only within the sidebar, not on the board

Appearance

All in Settings:

  • Theme — System, Light, Dark, or Dark + pitch black (a true-black surface that only applies while dark)
  • Accent — a preset, or Custom, which lets you pick a separate accent for light and dark mode. The Saturation slider (how much accent bleeds into surfaces) shows only while Custom is active
  • Background image — upload one; it’s downscaled to fit the storage budget, and an image that still won’t fit is declined with a notice. A dim overlay can be toggled over it
  • Font and Language. Language is independent of your browser’s locale and switches immediately

Workspaces

Optional; turn them on in Settings, where you also choose whether the switcher sits in the board toolbar or the page header. A workspace is a named presentation of your bookmarks — it remembers its own theme, column layout, notes, labels, tags, and comments. Your bookmarks themselves are shared across every workspace and never duplicated; only the presentation differs.

Create one (it starts as a copy of your current setup), rename it in place, or delete it (with an undo toast). Deleting a workspace never touches bookmarks. Turning workspaces off asks which one’s setup to keep.

Trash

Deleting a bookmark, folder, or note first raises an undo toast for a few seconds. After that the item is not gone: it goes to Settings → Trash, whose header carries a count for the current workspace. Each entry shows its age and, for a folder, how many items it holds, with a Restore button that puts it back where it came from — folder, column, and position. Empty trash discards the current workspace’s entries at once, and cannot be undone.

The trash holds your last 20 deletions, within a small size budget, for 7 days — whichever limit comes first. It exists for the mistake you notice an hour later; the backups above are for everything longer than that.

A restored bookmark or folder is new as far as your browser is concerned, so what Pikamark kept against the old one — tags, colour labels, reminders — doesn’t come back with it, and the toast says so when that happens. Notes restore intact.

Backup and restore

Settings → Backup → Export writes a JSON file — pikamark-export-chrome-macos-2026-09-02.json, named after this device and the day — containing your notes, favourites, colour labels, tags, comments, appearance settings, gallery state, and every workspace.

It does not contain your bookmark tree — that syncs through your browser account — and it does not contain reminders or your background image. Each workspace keeps its own background image, stored outside the backup file, so a restore leaves your backgrounds untouched. Import is a confirm-then-apply step: it re-links notes, tags, labels, and favourites to your current bookmarks by URL where ids have changed, and the summary afterwards reports how many it re-linked and how many it skipped because the bookmark is no longer there.

The confirm step names what’s in the file first — how many workspaces, columns, and notes, and how old the backup is — and every import or restore ends with a short summary of what came back, including a note when folders had to be added at the end because this browser didn’t have them.

The section opens with a single line stating where your backups stand: how fresh the newest one is, then where it goes — “Backed up today 14:20 · Chrome on macOS · Pikamark folder”, or “Backed up 3 days ago · this browser only”.

On a fresh setup, with nothing yet to lose, Pikamark offers once — right after the intro tour — to restore a backup from another browser. The button opens the file picker directly; dismissing it is final.

Automatic snapshots

Pikamark also keeps its own short history of snapshots, with no action from you. A snapshot is taken when you open a new tab and at least a day has passed since the last one — it is not a timer, and nothing is captured while the browser is closed. Settings → Backup lists the recent snapshots, newest first, each with a Restore button that runs the same confirm-then-apply step as importing a file. The history keeps only the last few snapshots, within a small size budget, so the oldest drop off as new ones arrive. Turn Keep automatic snapshots off to stop new ones being taken — the snapshots you already have stay restorable — and Clear history removes them.

Just before an import or a Clear history, Pikamark quietly takes one more snapshot first, so an unwanted change is one restore away. The settings button also shows a small marker when a backup needs attention — for example a connected folder that has lost access, or automatic snapshots switched off after you had a folder.

Snapshots live inside this browser profile: they survive a bad import, not a lost profile. On a browser with no backup folder — Firefox — the status line says so, and once a month Pikamark shows a notice whose button saves a copy to your device in one click. Saving one, by that button or by Export, quiets it for another month.

Backup folder

On Chrome and Edge you can also connect a folder on your computer: Settings → Backup → Connect a folder. Point the picker at a folder your cloud service keeps in sync and Pikamark creates a Pikamark sub-folder inside it — that sub-folder is where the backups go, so it’s easy to recognise later. From then on each snapshot is also written there as a dated file, so a copy outlives your browser profile. This is Chromium only; the row does not appear in Firefox. Folders you connected before this behaviour existed keep writing where they already write — nothing is moved.

After a browser restart the browser asks for folder access again. Grant it “on every visit” and it stops asking, and the folder keeps backing up unattended. Until access is restored, Pikamark shows a notice with a button that restores it, and nothing is written to disk. Disconnect forgets the folder without touching any file already on disk.

One set of files per device. Each browser profile writes its own dated files, named pikamark-backup-chrome-macos-a1b2c3d4-2026-09-02.json — this device’s name, an internal marker that never changes, and the date. Each device keeps only its own most recent few, so one device’s backups never crowd out or delete another’s, and the names are readable in Finder or Explorer without opening anything.

Pikamark names the device for you (“Chrome on macOS”, and so on). To change it, open the folder’s backup list and click the name on the row marked This device — the one place the name has any visible effect. New files carry the new name; files already written keep theirs, and stay grouped with the device that wrote them either way.

Restoring another device’s backup — two ways:

  • In Pikamark — when a connected folder holds backups, Settings → Backup lists them grouped by device, each with a Restore button. If another device has a newer backup than this one, Pikamark also shows a one-line prompt to restore it
  • Settings → Import — pick a pikamark-backup-…json file from the folder by hand

Both routes run the same confirm-then-apply step and the same summary.

A cloud service may leave extra copies of a file when it detects a conflict (the naming varies by service). Pikamark never deletes files it didn’t write, so those stay in the folder until you remove them — harmless, but yours to tidy.

Auto-arrange columns

Settings → “Auto-arrange columns” is a one-off action, with a confirm step, that spreads your folders across the columns in your browser’s own bookmark order. It touches only which column each folder sits in, never the bookmarks themselves. The board layout is otherwise fully independent and never rearranges on its own.

Keyboard

Single-key shortcuts, active whenever you’re not typing in a field:

  • f — jump to the search box
  • n — add a note
  • v — switch between board and gallery
  • s — turn selection mode on or off
  • Esc — steps back one layer per press: clear the selection, then clear active filters, then up one gallery folder, then leave gallery. It also closes a popover, cancels a rename, leaves pinned-links edit mode, and skips the intro tour
  • Enter — confirm any “type a name” popover, commit a rename, add a checklist item, or run a web search from the search box
  • Ctrl+V / ⌘+V — paste links onto the board to import them

There is no keyboard drag-and-drop; use Move to folder… and the ⋯ menu’s move rows to rearrange without a mouse.

Pro and early users

The board, gallery, drag-and-drop, search, notes, and every theme are free and always will be. Pro unlocks the at-scale tools — tags, comments and reminders, workspaces, pinned links, automatic backups, tab sessions, and custom appearance.

After you buy Pro, Freemius shows a license key (it starts sk_) and sends it in your receipt email; it is also in your Freemius account. Open Pikamark’s settings, go to the Pro row, paste the key, and select Activate.

If you used Pikamark before Pro existed, it stays unlocked for free in the browser profile you already had it in; on a new browser or computer, email ramapitex@gmail.com and I’ll send a key that carries your Pro across.

Browsers and permissions

Pikamark runs on Chrome, Edge, and Firefox from one codebase. It requests only the permissions it needs to do the above: bookmarks, storage, tabs (for saving open tabs and sessions), search (for web search), and favicon. There are no host permissions, no tracking, and no network requests for your data.