I posted a comment about this yesterday, but I think this is a very cool and useful thing you can do in Firefox to make searching a much more pleasant experience so I wanted to share the blog post...
I posted a comment about this yesterday, but I think this is a very cool and useful thing you can do in Firefox to make searching a much more pleasant experience so I wanted to share the blog post I wrote a while ago.
TL;DR: If you want to search a website directly, you can save a bookmark with a %s in it, and then add a "keyword" for the bookmark, and then search by typing keyword search term in the url bar, it will autocomplete as a search for your string
I used vimium for several years, but eventually I had to concede that it was irritating more often than it was helpful and I disabled it. I still miss typing qq to close all tabs to the right though
I used vimium for several years, but eventually I had to concede that it was irritating more often than it was helpful and I disabled it. I still miss typing qq to close all tabs to the right though
Oh wow I didn't know about qq, but it also doesn't seem to do anything for me so maybe I did some override with my manual hotkeys. I'll look into it. But generally for me, I can't imagine browsing...
Oh wow I didn't know about qq, but it also doesn't seem to do anything for me so maybe I did some override with my manual hotkeys. I'll look into it.
But generally for me, I can't imagine browsing the web anymore without Vimium, if I'm using someone else's laptop it's a pain.
In practice I use duckduckgo bang command with the same effect (!w Beethoven for Wikipedia, !gh angular for Github, etc) but of course this is useful if you have a local and/or private website to...
In practice I use duckduckgo bang command with the same effect (!w Beethoven for Wikipedia, !gh angular for Github, etc) but of course this is useful if you have a local and/or private website to search.
UI-wise I lament that everything is shoved into a unique bar. I stubbornly refuse to fuse them because in my mind location bar == past and present (where I am, where I was) while search bar is where I want to go.
Two eternities ago there was quite some activity around the idea of CLI-ing the Web browser. Anyone remember Firefox Ubiquity? It was kind of Quicksilver (the OSX launcher) but for the Web. Maybe with the current AI frenzy the idea of having small tools that you can call will come back.
I also insist on split address/search boxes, but for an entirely different conceptual reason: URLs are just a different sort of thing than search strings in my mind, and so entering a URL is a...
I also insist on split address/search boxes, but for an entirely different conceptual reason: URLs are just a different sort of thing than search strings in my mind, and so entering a URL is a different action than searching and belongs in its own UI component. It's the same reason it would never occur to me to try to search for files from a shell with cd search terms.
I'm oddly fascinated by this thing where you've arrived at the same conclusion via a path that is completely alien to me.
Doesn't it make sense to input where you'd like to be into your present location bar when you want to be elsewhere?
UI-wise I lament that everything is shoved into a unique bar. I stubbornly refuse to fuse them because in my mind location bar == past and present (where I am, where I was) while search bar is where I want to go.
Doesn't it make sense to input where you'd like to be into your present location bar when you want to be elsewhere?
Yes, but I didn't said it made sense for other people ! On a more practical sense I like the suggestion on the location bar to be only history while the one in the seach bar to be autocomplete.
Yes, but I didn't said it made sense for other people ! On a more practical sense I like the suggestion on the location bar to be only history while the one in the seach bar to be autocomplete.
This is tangentially related but a friend at Meta told me about a sort of similar tool they use to more easily navigate around their internal tools called bunnylol. It's a smart bookmark tool...
This is tangentially related but a friend at Meta told me about a sort of similar tool they use to more easily navigate around their internal tools called bunnylol. It's a smart bookmark tool where you also setup similar aliases for websites and can then also include arguments to then either search on those websites or navigate to specific webpages. So you can setup something like typing gl tildes/tildes to go to the Tildes source, or the example provided in the repo is typing gh facebook/bunnylol.rs to go to its source repo. My friend was showing me how they've got it setup to go to basically all their tools. You just type diffs to go to their internal PR/diff platform, tasks for their ticket platform, etc.
It's also open source so I've linked it below. You manage all your bindings in a TOML config file. It's sort of browser agnostic where you can setup a server to run this as a self-hosted "search engine" and then set it as the default search engine in your browser of choice.
My tangential hot tip is to disable history and suggestion entries in the address bar, leaving only bookmarks (including keyword bookmarks). I still retain a browsing history which can be searched...
My tangential hot tip is to disable history and suggestion entries in the address bar, leaving only bookmarks (including keyword bookmarks).
I still retain a browsing history which can be searched separately if the need arises, but for most day-to-day tasks it's enough that I can quickly access my slowly expanding set of bookmarks.
This one doesn't seem bad but personally I would be a lot happier with browsers if they left adress bar as address bar and left search to the already present dedicated box. Or at least exposed...
This one doesn't seem bad but personally I would be a lot happier with browsers if they left adress bar as address bar and left search to the already present dedicated box. Or at least exposed that setting instead of requiring workarounds for such a fundamental feature.
I consider omnibox one of most irritating small/infrequent annoyances in my life.
I posted a comment about this yesterday, but I think this is a very cool and useful thing you can do in Firefox to make searching a much more pleasant experience so I wanted to share the blog post I wrote a while ago.
TL;DR: If you want to search a website directly, you can save a bookmark with a
%sin it, and then add a "keyword" for the bookmark, and then search by typingkeyword search termin the url bar, it will autocomplete as a search for your stringFor common websites, I use Vimium. If you press B you can search your bookmarks and pressing enter opens the link in a new tab
I used vimium for several years, but eventually I had to concede that it was irritating more often than it was helpful and I disabled it. I still miss typing
qqto close all tabs to the right thoughOh wow I didn't know about qq, but it also doesn't seem to do anything for me so maybe I did some override with my manual hotkeys. I'll look into it.
But generally for me, I can't imagine browsing the web anymore without Vimium, if I'm using someone else's laptop it's a pain.
Ahh that might have been a custom keybind that I made actually, which would be funny if it was the main thing I was using the extension for
In practice I use duckduckgo bang command with the same effect (
!w Beethovenfor Wikipedia,!gh angularfor Github, etc) but of course this is useful if you have a local and/or private website to search.UI-wise I lament that everything is shoved into a unique bar. I stubbornly refuse to fuse them because in my mind location bar == past and present (where I am, where I was) while search bar is where I want to go.
Two eternities ago there was quite some activity around the idea of CLI-ing the Web browser. Anyone remember Firefox Ubiquity? It was kind of Quicksilver (the OSX launcher) but for the Web. Maybe with the current AI frenzy the idea of having small tools that you can call will come back.
I also insist on split address/search boxes, but for an entirely different conceptual reason: URLs are just a different sort of thing than search strings in my mind, and so entering a URL is a different action than searching and belongs in its own UI component. It's the same reason it would never occur to me to try to search for files from a shell with
cd search terms.I'm oddly fascinated by this thing where you've arrived at the same conclusion via a path that is completely alien to me.
Doesn't it make sense to input where you'd like to be into your present location bar when you want to be elsewhere?
Yes, but I didn't said it made sense for other people ! On a more practical sense I like the suggestion on the location bar to be only history while the one in the seach bar to be autocomplete.
I've been doing this for 20 years in Firefox at this point and still get excited when other people discover it.
This is tangentially related but a friend at Meta told me about a sort of similar tool they use to more easily navigate around their internal tools called bunnylol. It's a smart bookmark tool where you also setup similar aliases for websites and can then also include arguments to then either search on those websites or navigate to specific webpages. So you can setup something like typing
gl tildes/tildesto go to the Tildes source, or the example provided in the repo is typinggh facebook/bunnylol.rsto go to its source repo. My friend was showing me how they've got it setup to go to basically all their tools. You just typediffsto go to their internal PR/diff platform,tasksfor their ticket platform, etc.It's also open source so I've linked it below. You manage all your bindings in a TOML config file. It's sort of browser agnostic where you can setup a server to run this as a self-hosted "search engine" and then set it as the default search engine in your browser of choice.
http://github.com/facebook/bunnylol.rs
oh that seems awesome!! and probably a way easier way to manage bulk bookmarks than what I do lol
My tangential hot tip is to disable history and suggestion entries in the address bar, leaving only bookmarks (including keyword bookmarks).
I still retain a browsing history which can be searched separately if the need arises, but for most day-to-day tasks it's enough that I can quickly access my slowly expanding set of bookmarks.
This one doesn't seem bad but personally I would be a lot happier with browsers if they left adress bar as address bar and left search to the already present dedicated box. Or at least exposed that setting instead of requiring workarounds for such a fundamental feature.
I consider omnibox one of most irritating small/infrequent annoyances in my life.