Hex-Rays' blog

Igor’s tip of the week #80: Bookmarks – Hex Rays

Written by Igor Skochinsky | Mar 10, 2022

In addition to comments, IDA offers a few more features for annotating and quickly navigating in the database. Today we’ll cover bookmarks.

Adding bookmarks

Bookmarks can be added at most locations in the address-based views (disassembly listing, Hex View, Pseudocode), as well as Structures and Enums. This can be done via the Jump > Mark position… menu, or the hotkey Alt–M. You can enter a short text to describe the bookmark which will then be displayed in the bookmark list.

 

In the disassembly listing, bookmarks can be quickly added while in the text view by clicking to the left of the breakpoint circles in the execution flow arrows panel. In that case, the bookmark description will contain only the address and the label, if any. Active bookmarks are marked with the an icon which can be clicked again to remove them. Hover the mouse over the icon to see the bookmark’s description.

Managing and navigating bookmarks

To see the list of bookmarks and quickly jump to any of them, use Jump > Jump to &marked position… menu, or the Ctrl–M hotkey. This dialog can also be used to delete or edit bookmarks via the context menu or hotkeys (Del and Ctrl–E, respectively). 

However, if you add many bookmarks, it can get difficult to find the one you need, so in IDA 7.6 we’ve added a dedicated bookmarks view as well as the possibility to group bookmarks into folders. The new view is available via View > Open subviews > Bookmarks, or Ctrl–Shift–M shortcut. The window is non-modal and can be docked.