I built the initial BrainTool to scratch a personal itch - to unify my bookmarks and online resources with text-based notes. I've spent the last several months iterating on it with feedback from early adopters and UX volunteers. It's finally at the point where I feel confident enough to seek this communities feedback.

BrainTool is a browser extension that makes it easy to save pages of interest into a personal 'topic' hierarchy, along with associated notes. Your topics are shown in an editable side panel which can also control the browser - opening and closing tabs, tab groups and windows by topic. There's a 90 sec intro video here: https://youtu.be/7zvyvATpoVM

The above by itself makes BrainTool one of the handiest bookmarks/tabs/browser managers around, but the kicker is that all your data is stored in a separately editable org-mode[1] format plaintext file. Off-browser I edit my braintool file in emacs but I've also played around syncing with LogSeq, Orgzly and other org-based tools. If you're an emacs user it could give you a shallow on-ramp into the world of org-mode, if you're an aspiring PKMer it's an easy way to slurp in all of your online resources, if you just want to get out of tab hell and up your browser game - dive right in!

Its serverless so your data never leaves your personal environment. Chromium-based browsers only for now (Chrome, Edge, Brave, etc. not FF).

Landing page: https://braintool.org

Some articles on use: https://braintool.org/posts.html

Github repo: https://github.com/tconfrey/BrainTool

[1] https://orgmode.org/