A Better Way to Bookmark Code as a Developer

💡 Trying to bookmark code in your browser is pretty painful when you want to find and revisit that solution later. An easy hack is to save code with Pieces for Developers, which automatically attaches the source URL from where you grabbed the snippet. You can not only find the snippet easily later, but you can hop out to the page it came from to remind yourself about the broader context.

I’m sure most of you search Google to find solutions for errors, from how to sort a list to a breadth-first binary tree traversal to how to establish a database connection.

Chances are, you bookmark code solutions from some StackOverflow page, thinking it’s saved for the future.

But revisiting that solution in your bookmarks folder is not the best way to manage bookmarks for a bunch of reasons:

• Unstructured bookmark lists are hard to search, and you have no idea where to start looking for the solution.

• Maybe you spend a bunch of effort organizing bookmarks, but most of us don’t have time.

• A bookmark provides minimal information unless you click through each link.

• Bookmarks save no context for your problem, which is often how you might want to search.

Fear not - let’s look at the best bookmarking tool, Pieces for Developers. It’s much more effective at managing your saved links and solutions.

A much more effective way to bookmark code

You might know Pieces for Developers as a snippet tool where you can save code and easily find, reuse, or reference it later. One of the more interesting ways I use Pieces is through the Chrome extension, which enables me to save code from any webpage with one click.

The most killer feature of the Pieces for Chrome extension, though, is Related Links. This makes it far more useful as a home for your URLs.  When you save a snippet from a web page using the extension, Pieces automatically saves the URL of the page the snippet came from (along with tags, smart descriptions, and other auto-enriched metadata)..

So when you need that snippet, you can use Global Search in Pieces for Developers using exact or fuzzy match based on the snippet or the language, and you’ll also find a link to the URL that you originally got the snippet from. THAT is incredibly helpful to refresh on the context around the snippet. Way more helpful than a quickly bookmarked code snippet!

Let’s look at some examples in the wild...

Finding Shell Commands

If you’ve ever tried bookmarking your dev shell commands, you know it’s much easier to just search for them again than find them in your bookmarks list.

Finding Shell Commands without Pieces:

1. Open your bookmarks

2. Try to remember what the page was

3. Scroll through an endless list

4. Finally find the link and navigate to it‍‍

Finding Shell Commands with Pieces:

1. Search for the saved snippet

2. Navigate to its related links

Saving Git Commands

Git commands are super handy. Maybe you’ve searched code in GitHub then tried bookmarking a list of Git commands to merge your local branch, fetch, rebase, or resolve conflicts for your ease, but forgot your way back.

If you’d saved those commands in Pieces for Developers, you can get right back to your page in no time using the Related Links feature.

‍Frontend Development

While working with CSS, in your preferred IDE, you might get confused about when to use an inline, block, or inline-block display for controlling the layout of an element. Scrolling through a never-ending list of code bookmarks to find their correct usage on W3Schools is a nightmare, isn’t it? Instead, you can simply save a snippet in Pieces and jump to the relevant pages to understand their use cases. Don’t bookmark code; find the right snippet and use it in no time.

💡Along with saving the links to pages, Pieces also helps you save specific information about them. So if you’ve some code that you feel like revisiting, rather than bookmarking the page, try saving developer materials with Pieces for Developers. You’ll save a lot more time looking for it later!

Upgrade Your Ability to Bookmark Code with Pieces - It’s Totally Free

You can install Pieces for free to save all your important information where it's organized and easily accessible. Plus, you'll get a ton of other amazing benefits to supercharge your developer workflow.

Don’t forget to install our browser bookmark management tools, like the Pieces for Edge and Pieces for Chrome extension to enable single-click save save and other productive features wherever you are.