bpm's Operations Room

My interest in bookmarks started in January 2008, when I made a project of a macro to optimize them for use as real note-taking tools (which they're quite capable of being) - but within the constraints of the existing dialog panel. More recently, I saw Tamil's tweak which eliminated the toggled Details panel by a small edit of the dialog.ini file - elegantly solving a problem I had been wrestling with in clumsy ways. Taking it further, this is a substantially perfected text-capable bookmark: controls refined for space efficiency, freed to stretch in height as well as width.

Here's the default bookmark:



and here it is after you've clicked the details button to get access to its fields:



By simply commenting out two lines in the code for the dialog, Tamil eliminated the hiding feature and the button which triggers it:



I didn't like the wasted space there, so I moved and resized a few controls. The nickname would never need all that space, and I don't need to see "show on" for the panel chceckbox... result was text box up to about eight lines from three:

But... like stock bookmarks, it only stretched in width. Why put up with that? No reason this thing shouldn't be able to stretch to full-screen size (and be almost all description field). So I stuck with it, and found the needed tweaks. (Also changed the Bookmark Properties dialog, which is how you access descriptions for existing bookmarks - and Folder Properties dialog, so you can stretch it too. I put notes in description fields of folders on Personal Bar.)

I don't think there's any limit to how much you can put in a bookmark. You can stash whole articles in them, if you want - and then use the Save-selected and Merge features to move them in and out of your system, if need be.

Here's the code for it, along with the header for a dialog.ini file. If you don't have a custom dialog ini, you can make one by copying the blue text below, creating a text file called My Dialog.ini or whatever in your Opera folder (check Help / About Opera for path), and pasting. Finally, go to the Dialog Configuration preference where you can use the choose button to select your new file and get it registered.

And on this page of Tamil's blog you can get a few other dialogs shorn of their Details equipment, including Delete Private Data (a good one to fix, so you can see what's about to be destroyed).

Opera Preferences version 2.0
; Dialog modification file for Opera. To reload after modification, restart Opera.
; This file is stored in UTF-8 encoding

[Add Bookmark Dialog]
Title = 70495
Group0, 67000, , 10, 10, 330, 323, Center, End
Label1, 25103, Name_label, 0, 0, 90, 23, Fixed
Edit2, 0, Name_edit, 100, 0, 270, 23, Size right
Label13, 70496, Parent_label, 0, 30, 90, 23,fixed
Dropdown, , Parent_dropdown, 200, 30, 170, 23, Size right
Button, 70497, New_folder_button,100,30,80,23, = New folder
Label5, 10944, URL_label, 0, 60, 150, 23, Fixed
Edit6, 0, URL_edit, 100, 60, 270, 23, Size right
Label3, 10943, Nick_label, 0, 90, 90, 23, Fixed
Edit4, 0, Nick_edit, 100, 90, 130, 23, fixed
Checkbox15, "PB", ShowOnPersonalbar_check, 260, 90, 50, 23,fixed
Checkbox16, "panel", ViewInPanel_check, 320, 90, 60, 23, fixed
Label7, 10945, Description_label, 0, 120, 90, 23, Fixed
MultilineEdit8, 0, Description_edit, 100, 120, 270, 120, Size

[Bookmark Properties Dialog]
Title = 22115
Group0, 67000, , 10, 10, , , Center, End
Label1, 25103, Name_label, 0, 0, 45, 23, Fixed
Edit2, 0, Name_edit, 50, 0, 280, 23, Size right
Label3, "nick", Nick_label, 0, 30,40, 23, Fixed
Edit4, 0, Nick_edit, 50, 30, 100, 23, Size right
Label5, "URL", URL_label, 0, 60, 25, 23, Fixed
MultilineEdit6, 0, URL_edit, 30, 60, 300, 92, Size right
MultilineEdit8, 0, Description_edit, 0, 159, 330, 53, Size
Label9, 10824, Created_label, 0, 220, 45, 23, Move down
Label10, , Created_text, 50, 220, 100, 23, Move down
Label11, 10825, Visited_label,160, 220, 45, 23, Move down
Label12, , Visited_text, 210, 220, 120, 23, Size right Move down
Checkbox15, "PB", ShowOnPersonalbar_check, 200, 30, 40, 23, Move right
Checkbox16, "panel", ViewInPanel_check, 250, 30, 50, 23, Move right

[Folder Properties Dialog]
Title = D_FOLDER_PROPERTIES_DIALOG_TITLE
Group0, D_M2_ACCOUNT_PROPERTIES_GENERAL, , 10, 0, 330, 323, Center, End
Label1, DI_ID_HLFILEPROP_FNAME_LABEL, label_for_Name_edit, 0, 0, 40, 23, Fixed
Edit2, 0, Name_edit, 45, 0, 110, 23, Size right
Label3, "nick", label_for_Nick_edit,170, 0,30, 23, move right
Edit4, 0, Nick_edit, 200, 0, 60, 23, move right
MultilineEdit8, 0, Description_edit, 0,30, 330, 153, Size
Checkbox15, "PB", ShowOnPersonalbar_check, 280, 0, 40, 23, Move right