MarkWell documentation
A native bookmark manager for Mac, iPhone, and iPad. Save a link from anywhere, tag it however you think about it, and find it again on every device. No separate account, no server, no tracking. This page walks through every feature in roughly the order you'd meet it.
Installation
MarkWell comes three ways. The download from bendansby.com/apps/markwell is a standard .dmg — open it and drag MarkWell.app to your Applications folder. The App Store version (Mac, iPhone, and iPad) installs and updates the usual way. On the Mac, MarkWell is also included with a Setapp subscription.
Requires macOS 14 Sonoma or later, and iOS / iPadOS 17 or later. The direct-download Mac build checks for updates on its own; you can also check anytime via MarkWell → Check for Updates….
Quick start
- Open MarkWell. The window splits into a tag sidebar on the left and your bookmark list on the right.
- Press ⌘N (or click + in the toolbar) to add a bookmark. If a URL is on your clipboard, it's filled in for you.
- Type or paste a link, add a few comma-separated tags, and press Save. MarkWell fetches the page's title and favicon so the row looks right immediately.
- Click a row to open the bookmark in your browser. Click a tag in the sidebar to filter the list down to it.
- Press ⌘F any time to jump to the search field.
From the share sheet
The fastest way to save is from wherever you already are. In Safari, Mail, Messages, or any other app, open the system Share sheet and pick MarkWell. The link is handed to MarkWell and appears in your library the next time the app opens or comes to the foreground — no need to switch apps mid-task.
On iPhone and iPad this is the share button; on the Mac it's Share → MarkWell from Safari's toolbar or any app's Share menu. Shared links flow through a private hand-off area inside the app group, so the extension never has to touch the main database directly. If the link is already in your library, the share panel tells you so before you save a duplicate.
Drag, drop & the bookmarklet
Two more ways to get a link into MarkWell without switching apps:
- Drag and drop (Mac). Drag a link straight from Safari's address bar, a page, or Finder onto the MarkWell window to open the Add Bookmark sheet prefilled with the URL. Dropping fills in the title and description the same way pasting a link in by hand does.
- The bookmarklet. For Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and any other browser without a native macOS share menu, drag the one-click MarkWell bookmarklet to your bookmarks bar. Clicking it hands the current page's URL and title to MarkWell via a
markwell://addlink and opens the Add Bookmark sheet, prefilled and ready to save. Reach it any time from Help → Get the Bookmarklet.
The bookmark editor
The editor is the same sheet whether you're adding a new bookmark or editing an existing one. It has four fields:
- Link — paste or type a URL.
- Title — the page title. Left blank, MarkWell fills it in for you (see below).
- Description — an optional note.
- Tags — comma-separated. New tags are created as you type them, with suggestions as you go (see below).
Press Save to commit or Cancel to back out. To edit an existing bookmark: on the Mac, hover a row and click the pencil; on iPad it's always visible; on iPhone, swipe the row.
utm_source — so near-identical links still get flagged. It's a heads-up, not a block: saving anyway is always allowed.
Autofill & auto-title
Two conveniences are on by default and can be toggled in Preferences:
- Autofill link from clipboard. When you open the New Bookmark form and your clipboard holds a URL, MarkWell pastes it into the Link field automatically.
- Auto-populate title and description. When you save a bookmark, MarkWell fetches the page's title and description for you — both in the app and from the share sheet — so you rarely have to type them.
Smart tag suggestions
The Tags field suggests chips as you go, in the editor and the share sheet alike:
- Typing a tag matches it against tags already in your library first, so you land on
illustrationinstead of accidentally spawningillustrator. A chip that isn't one of your existing tags renders green with a “+” so it's clear you're minting something new. - Not typing anything shows a row of ✨ suggestions instead, pulled from the bookmark's title and description using on-device natural-language processing — named entities like organizations and places, plus capitalized nouns MarkWell judges tag-shaped.
Tap or click a chip to add it. All of this runs on-device — no network request, no third-party service.
Tags, not folders
MarkWell organizes by tags instead of nested folders. Give a link as many tags as it has ideas — recipe, weeknight, to-try — and it shows up under each. There's no rigid tree to maintain and nothing to file something into "correctly."
When you import bookmarks from a browser, the browser's nested folders are flattened into tags: a bookmark in Programming › Swift arrives tagged both Programming and Swift.
The sidebar
The sidebar lists All Bookmarks at the top, followed by every tag in your library with a count beside it. Select All Bookmarks to see everything, or click a tag to filter the list down to just the bookmarks carrying it.
Search
The search field matches across title, URL, and tag at once, so you can find a link by any of them. Press ⌘F to jump straight to the field from anywhere in the app. Search narrows whatever the sidebar is currently showing, so you can combine a tag filter with a text search.
Opening & editing
Click (or tap) any row to open that bookmark in your default browser. Right-click a row for the full menu: Open in Browser, Edit…, and Delete. On iPhone, swipe a row left to delete it (and to edit, in compact width).
Favicons
Bookmark rows show each site's real favicon instead of a lettered tile, wherever one exists. Icons are fetched privately — straight from the site itself, never a third-party favicon service — and cached both in memory and on disk so they survive a relaunch.
Favicons are only ever fetched over the network at the moment you save or edit a bookmark. Simply opening MarkWell or scrolling the list never makes a connection to any saved site — row display reads the cache only. To backfill icons for bookmarks you saved before this existed (or imported), choose File → Fetch Favicons on the Mac, or ••• → Fetch Favicons on iOS — a one-time, user-triggered pass over your whole library.
Import bookmarks
On the Mac, choose File → Import Bookmarks… (⌘⇧O); on iPhone and iPad it's in the toolbar's ••• menu. MarkWell reads two formats:
- Netscape HTML — the universal bookmark export that every browser writes: Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Brave, Arc, Vivaldi. Export from your browser, then point MarkWell at the file. Nested folders become tags.
- JSON — MarkWell's own export format (below), for moving a library between devices or keeping a backup.
If the file overlaps with bookmarks you already have, MarkWell tells you how many before importing anything, with the choice to skip the duplicates, import everyone anyway, or cancel. A clean file with no overlap imports straight through with no extra dialog.
Export bookmarks
Choose File → Export Bookmarks… on the Mac, or the ••• menu on iOS. Two formats are on offer:
- As JSON (MarkWell Backup)… (⌘⇧E) — the lossless round-trip format: every bookmark's URL, title, description, tags, and dates, ready to re-import on another device or keep as a portable backup that isn't tied to any cloud.
- As Netscape HTML (Other Browsers)… — the universal format every browser and bookmark manager reads, for taking your library somewhere other than MarkWell. One extra click on the Mac (it doesn't carry a shortcut of its own — ⌘⇧E always exports straight to JSON).
iCloud sync
Cross-device iCloud sync is part of the App Store version. With it, your bookmarks sync end-to-end through your own iCloud account using Apple's CloudKit framework — a bookmark saved on your iPhone shows up on your Mac a few seconds later. There is no MarkWell account and no MarkWell server; your data stays under your Apple ID. MarkWell keeps a full local copy too, so it works completely offline — sync just reconciles when you reconnect.
Sync status lives in Preferences under iCloud: the signed-in account, whether a sync is in progress, and when the last one happened.
Preferences
Open MarkWell → Settings… (⌘,) on the Mac, or the ••• menu on iOS. Up to three sections, depending on your channel:
- General — toggles for Autofill link from clipboard and Auto-populate title and description (see above).
- iCloud — the sync status surface described under iCloud sync. Only shown on the App Store version, since the other channels have no sync state to report.
- Danger Zone — Delete All Bookmarks, a one-tap way to clear your entire library. It's behind a confirmation that states exactly how many bookmarks will go, and warns that the deletion carries over to your other devices if iCloud sync is on. This can't be undone.
Windows
On the Mac, ⌘N is mapped to New Bookmark rather than the usual new-window command, because adding a bookmark is what you reach for most. To open a second window onto the same library, use File → New Window (⌥⌘N). All windows share one library, so a change in one appears in the others. New Bookmark also works when no window is open — it opens one and drops you straight into the editor.
Keyboard shortcuts
On the Mac:
| Keys | Action |
|---|---|
| ⌘N | New bookmark |
| ⌥⌘N | New window |
| ⌘F | Focus the search field |
| ⌘⇧O | Import bookmarks… |
| ⌘⇧E | Export bookmarks as JSON… |
| ⌘, | Settings |
Languages
MarkWell is localized into English, Deutsch, Español, Français, Italiano, 日本語, 한국어, Português (Brasil), Українська, Русский, and 简体中文. It picks the right language automatically from your System Settings → General → Language & Region.
To pin MarkWell to one language without changing your system preferences, open System Settings → General → Language & Region → Applications, click +, and choose MarkWell.
License
MarkWell ships through three channels — pick the one that fits how you like to pay for software:
- Direct download. A one-time license unlocks the direct-download Mac build. Unlicensed, MarkWell works with no feature locked for a 7-day grace period, then shows a one-screen reminder every fifth bookmark you add — buy, enter a key, or dismiss it and keep going. Buy via MarkWell → Buy License… in the app menu; activate via Enter License…. Activation needs the internet briefly, then works offline; MarkWell revalidates quietly in the background so refunded or revoked keys stop working. This build runs on a local library (no iCloud sync — see iCloud sync).
- App Store. Paid once through Apple's standard pipeline — Mac, iPhone, and iPad, with iCloud sync across all three. No separate license key. This is the version to choose if you want cross-device sync.
- Setapp. The Mac app is included with a Setapp subscription. No separate license key, no trial reminders; Setapp handles billing and delivers updates automatically. Like the direct-download build, the Setapp version runs on a local library (no iCloud sync).
Privacy
MarkWell collects nothing. There are no analytics, no accounts, and no third-party SDKs. The only network requests the app makes on its own are the title-and-description fetch and the favicon fetch when you save or edit a link — both go straight to the site itself, never a third-party lookup service (see Favicons). iCloud sync (when enabled) runs through Apple's servers under your Apple ID. The full privacy policy spells it out.