Hande, Let’s Go! — The User Manual

Author

Ishe Chinyoka

Published

October 1, 2026

Introduction

What is hande?

Hande, Let’s Go! — “hande” for short, “hlg” if you’re abbreviating further — is a command-line bookmark manager. It keeps track of the things you come back to often: websites, local files and directories, shell scripts, one-liner commands, even search engines, all addressed by short, memorable names you choose yourself.

Where a browser’s bookmark manager only understands web addresses, hande understands anything your shell can run. A bookmark can point to a URL, but it can just as easily point to a script, a directory you cd into often, or a one-liner you’d otherwise have to retype. hande decides how to open each one using a handler — the program responsible for it — which you can set explicitly or let hande infer from the kind of location it is.

hande is built to be used two ways, and this manual covers both throughout:

As a quick, single command from your ordinary shell prompt: type hande followed by a bookmark’s name (or its shortcut key), and it launches and gets out of your way.
As its own interactive shell: run hande with no arguments at all, and you get a prompt of its own to work from — browsing, editing, and launching bookmarks without leaving it, for as long as you like.

Everything you can do in the shell has a direct command-line equivalent, and vice versa. Which one you reach for is a matter of taste and habit, not capability.

Conventions used in this manual

Two prompts appear throughout this manual, and it matters which one you’re looking at:

hlg> marks a command typed inside hande’s own interactive shell. For example:
```
hlg> news
```
$ hande marks a command typed at your regular system shell — bash, zsh, or whatever you use day to day — calling hande directly, without entering its interactive shell at all. For example:
```
$ hande news
```

When a working example needs a category to demonstrate switching, the prompt changes to show it, e.g. hlg (books)>. That’s exactly what you’ll see on your own screen once you’ve switched to a category called “books” — it isn’t a placeholder, it’s genuinely part of the prompt.

Anything you type is shown in a fixed-width font, like hande --list. Anything you need to substitute yourself — a name, a key, a path — is written in italics inside the description around it, rather than with special bracket notation, since hande’s own syntax already makes heavy use of brackets and braces for other things.

A shell command is always written with its leading colon, e.g. :add-bookmark, since the colon is how hande’s shell tells a command apart from an ordinary bookmark name you’re trying to open.

A tour of the rest of this manual

Chapter 1 gets you moving: the shell, the command line, and the handful of triggers and shortcuts that make both fast to use.
Chapter 2 covers how bookmarks are organized into categories and subcategories, and what “scope” means for a bookmark.
Chapter 3 is the reference for a bookmark entry itself: its name, its location, and its handler.
Chapter 4 covers the @ shortcuts and references that save you from typing out full addresses by hand.
Chapter 5 covers everything you can layer on top of a plain bookmark: comments, tags, search flags, and deactivation.
Chapter 6 covers moving bookmarks in and out of a real browser.
Chapter 7 covers hande’s own configuration file.
The appendices are reference material: a complete sample bookmark file, the reference-variable syntax, every exit code hande can produce, and a glossary of the terms this manual uses.