Thursday, February 22, 2007

Feature I wish I'd known about before

This morning I woke up (after two hours long sleep), dressed, went to work and suddenly an idea enlightened me. The idea I supposed would change the world from its roots. Well, at least my world.

You see - I love keyboard. Because it's fast. Faster than mouse. Actually it's an ideal input device for me. No way I'd ever have enough time and nerves to explain to the computer what I want to do with voice commands. Mind control may be useful, but for some reason it scares me just to think about it...

That's why I fell in love with Launchy. It's so simple and yet 42 times as much useful. When you press assigned shortcut (ALT+space is default, but I changed it ALT+Esc) launchy displays a simple text box. Just type part of the name of an application/document/bookmark (you choose) which you want to run/open, press enter and Launchy launches it for you. Simple, yet ingenious if you ask me.

Back to the idea, now. I wanted similar feature for Firefox. I wanted an extension in which you could define shortcuts for URLs. After you type shortcut in, say, location bar, you'd be directed to the mapped URL. For example, instead of typing "https://www.google.com/analytics/home/" one could type only "gan" and get to Google Analytics homepage. Would change world from deepest roots, don't you think?

Just moments before I started preparing all the tools I need for building an extension I googled a bit and found that Firefox supports that feature. By default. It's called - keywords.

Right click on any of your bookmarks and type a keyword. After that you can just focus location bar (CTRL+L, of course) and type the keyword. Works like a charm :D

Moral to the story: start googling before you write the code. Speaking of morals check today's joke of the day.