Would be nice to have a trustworthy #Firefox add-on for doing search-and-replace on URLs in bookmarks, to fix up #GitLab's arbitrary renaming of "/-/issues/" to "/-/work_items/"

[nekohayo@mastodon.social]

Would be nice to have a trustworthy #Firefox add-on for doing search-and-replace on URLs in bookmarks, to fix up #GitLab's arbitrary renaming of "/-/issues/" to "/-/work_items/"

The most popular add-on I found, https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/bookmarks-organizer/, can't do it. Everything else in https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?q=bookmarks+replace+url replace url seems to have a few hundred users at most…

According to "Bookmarks Organizer", I have over 18,000 bookmarks, of which 1k are GitLab issues URLs, so doing it manually would be very inefficient.

[rnb@framapiaf.org]

@nekohayo

Et pourquoi pas exporter les bookmarks (en HTML ou en JSON), corriger avec un outils dédié puis réimporter les bookmarks ?

[cristianrasch@fosstodon.org]

@rnb @nekohayo Was about to propose the same workflow. Using a powerful text editor like #vim that's just 2 commands way (one to make the substitution across the entire file, plus another to save your changes and exit the editor)

[nekohayo@mastodon.social]

@cristianrasch @rnb
Yuck
But also, I fear this rugpull could go "very wrong" with Firefox Sync across multiple computers, and with extensions such as https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/snoozetabs/ (which uses bookmarks behind the scenes)

[rnb@framapiaf.org]

@nekohayo @cristianrasch

I've done a lot of export import of bookmarks between browsers over the years without problems (except with Gnome Epiphany)

The size (18 000 bookmarks ) should not be a problem, but I don't know how Firefox Sync will react.

Maybe a "dryrun" with a dedicated firefox profile to see how it goes.

[inguin@nerdculture.de]

@nekohayo
Don't know of any extension, sorry.

My own approach for a similar migration was to fix this up directly in the history/bookmarks database:

- Quit Firefox
- Find the places.sqlite file in your profile
- Make a backup!
- Type: sqlite3 places.sqlite
- Type: update moz_places set url = replace(url, '/-/issues?', '/-/work_items?');
- Quit with Ctrl-D

This will fix both bookmarks and the history. Unfortunately I have no clue how Firefox Sync will react to this stunt.

[nekohayo@mastodon.social]

YOLO I guess, I was not going to be doing manual database surgery nor manually editing a thousand bookmarks, so ended up using https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/bookmark-url-batch-replacer/ and hoping that it can be trusted.

That UI is sketchy as hell, but it seems like "/-/issues/" and "/-/work_items/" did not trigger any regexes.

[rnb@framapiaf.org]

@nekohayo @cristianrasch

Here's a really simple firefox extension that could do the trick.

__Test__ and __backups__ before of course.

update bookmarks ($7643) · Snippets · GitLab

Framagit

GitLab (framagit.org)

[danialbehzadi@persadon.com]

@nekohayo
Did you try escaping slashes? (\/)

[deobald@fantastic.earth]

@nekohayo this is a small hearbreak and horror for those of us who just spent a few months writing immutable bookmark managers.