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!