Fabian 🚒
Writing about Developer Productivity, Streamlining your workflow, and Mindful Digital Organisation
1y ago
Day 12: Supercharge Your Browsing Productivity with Templated Bookmarks (1/2)
Fabian @ederbit

This is an essential technique any Poweruser should know.

Yet the only person I know of using this built-in feature, is my Bioinformatics Professor. That was 4 years ago. And this trick still proves useful even after all this time.

Firefox allows you to assign keywords to bookmarks. Google Chrome call this customized search engines. For instance, I can open my Youtube favorites page by typing yf in the address bar.

Duh, that's what bookmarks are for. What's so special about it?

Wait, it gets better. You can not only open specific pages more quickly. You can also template the bookmark with placeholders. The placeholder %s will get replaced with the search query after the keyword.

This means you can search directly in Wikipedia by using this URL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s and assigning a keyword, such as wiki. This results in less context switching and less disruptions to your thinking.

Awesome! Now I can open my favorite Wikipedia Article with wiki Cryptocephalus gibbicollis.

Well ... yeah. There are other cool use cases tool.

Use Cases for templated bookmarks

  • Search directly on Youtube/Amazon/Google Maps/Wikipedia/..

  • Calculate stuff with Wolfram Alpha wr: log(10)

  • Jump to a specific Jira Ticket with jira TICKET-ID

  • Launch a fresh Google Doc with :gdoc

  • Search for research papers in IEEE ieee: paper

  • Open the Gitlab File Finder of my dot-files repo dot

  • Get the Bibliography from a DOI doi: 10.1080/02626667.2018.1560449

Read Part II in the comments!

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