bmm: the Rust TUI bookmark manager built as a faster buku (2026)

Dhruv Thakur built bmm because buku, which he'd been using for years, started slowing down under the weight of accumulated bookmarks. 1 The solution he shipped is a Rust TUI bookmark manager backed by SQLite, powered by ratatui — and the ratatui maintainer himself switched to it on release day.

bmm TUI showing 36 bookmarks in a list view with URI and title columns, plus a details panel showing the selected bookmark's tags — bmm TUI bookmarks list — 36 entries, tags visible in the detail panel below 1

Tool snapshot

Field	Value
Repository	github.com/dhth/bmm
Language	Rust (100%)
License	MIT 2
Version	v0.3.1 (May 16, 2026) 3
Stars	229★ 1
Backend	SQLite via sqlx
TUI stack	ratatui + clap
Platforms	macOS (ARM64, x64), Linux (ARM64, x64, MUSL) — no Windows binary

Install

Three paths, pick one: 1

# Homebrew (macOS/Linux)
brew install dhth/tap/bmm

# Cargo
cargo install bmm

# Prebuilt binary — GitHub Releases, macOS and Linux ARM64/x64/MUSL
# https://github.com/dhth/bmm/releases

Real-world workflow

You've got a few hundred development links scattered across browser bookmarks and a half-maintained buku database. Here's how bmm fits into a terminal workflow:

# Add a bookmark with tags
bmm save https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/ --tags rust,reference

# Import your existing buku export (HTML Netscape format) or a plain TXT list
bmm import bookmarks.html
bmm import links.txt

# Search by keyword across URIs and titles — fast against SQLite
bmm search "async runtime"

# Filter by tag, pipe results anywhere
bmm list --tag rust | fzf

# Open the TUI for browsing and tag management
bmm tui

# In the TUI: navigate with j/k, copy a URI to clipboard with c, search interactively

The TUI is a two-panel layout: bookmark list on top, detail pane below showing URI, title, and tags for the selected item. Search is a live filter across the list. URI copy to clipboard was added in v0.3.0 — that's the feature that makes it actually usable inside tmux without leaving the terminal.

The author benchmarks it as roughly 20× faster than buku for search operations. 1 That's CI-tested, not anecdotal. If your buku database has grown into thousands of entries, the difference is felt immediately.

Community signal

Orhun Parmaksız (the maintainer of ratatui, with 8,800+ followers on X) posted when bmm launched: 4

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That endorsement carries more weight than the raw star count. Parmaksız sees every ratatui-based TUI that ships; when he personally migrates to one and says so publicly, it's worth noting.

At 229 stars and 2,721 crates.io downloads, bmm hasn't reached mainstream visibility yet. 5 Terminal Trove lists it without a featured slot. 6 This is the kind of tool you find before it hits the aggregators.

github.com · GitHub repository

dhth/bmm

https://github.com/dhth/bmm

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What to know before installing

Active maintenance is slow. There's a 14-month gap between v0.3.0 (March 2025) and v0.3.1 (May 2026) — and v0.3.1 was only a dependency and toolchain bump. 3 Seven open issues as of June 2026 have no recent maintainer responses. 7 The author also maintains omm (task manager) and hours (time tracking), so attention is split.

That said: the core feature set is complete and fully functional. bmm does the thing it was designed to do — store, tag, search, and retrieve bookmarks from a terminal — and does it fast. You're not waiting on a roadmap; you're using a stable tool in slow maintenance mode.

No Windows binary. macOS and Linux only. WSL should work but isn't documented.

Cover image: AI-generated illustration