Cairn#

A cairn is a human-made pile of stones raised as a marker — used for centuries to guide travellers, mark summits, and preserve important locations.

Cairn is a CLI bookmark manager with a terminal UI and a Vicinae browser extension. Like its namesake, it helps you mark the places worth returning to.

Cairn stores bookmarks locally in SQLite, supports full-text search, tags, pinning, archiving, and optional Dropbox sync across machines.

Features#

• Interactive TUI — browse, search, and manage bookmarks with a keyboard-driven interface
• Full-text search — powered by SQLite FTS5 for fast, accurate results
• Tags, pinning, archiving — organise bookmarks your way
• Dropbox sync — keep bookmarks in sync across multiple machines
• JSON output — pipe results into scripts or other tools
• Vicinae extension — save and search bookmarks directly from the Vicinae browser launcher
• Static binary — single binary with no runtime dependencies (CGO_ENABLED=0)

Screenshots#

CLI#

Vicinae Extension#

Quick Start#

# Install (Linux / macOS)
curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ndy40/cairn/main/install.sh | sh

# Launch the TUI
cairn

# Add a bookmark
cairn add https://example.com --tags "reading,tools"

# Search
cairn search "golang"

See Installation for more options or Quickstart to get up and running fast.

Documentation#

• Installation — Download the binary or build from source.
• Quickstart — Get up and running in minutes.
• CLI Reference — Complete command and flag reference.
• Configuration — Config file, env vars, and precedence.
• Dropbox Sync — Sync bookmarks across devices.
• Vicinae Extension — Save and search from the browser launcher.
• Security — Credential storage and best practices.
• Architecture — How Cairn is built.