TIL: Chrome allows you to define a Custom Search Engine (CSE) by which you can search sites. The cool part is that you’re not really limited to search only, and that you can abuse these CSEs to become more productive. In this post I’ll show you how to tweet from the Chrome Address Bar.
The idea was sparked by this tweet by Rowan Merewood. Rowan created a CSE to quickly go to a Zoom meeting by simply typing zoom meeting-id in the Chrome Address Bar.
Don’t mind the word “Search”: Upon hitting ENTER the browser won’t search Zoom but will directly go to the Zoom meeting with ID 123456789.
A Custom Search Engine (CSE) is defined by three parameters:
Search Engine: The name that will be shown in the Chrome Address Bar when typing in keyword
Keyword: The keyword that needs to trigger the Search Engine
URL: The URL that will be visited once you press enter. Use %s where you want your “search term” to appear.
As he uses DuckDuckGo as his default search engine, the trick works fine from the address bar:
The Address Bar will pass the entered term to search DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckGo will interpret the !tw prefix and redirect to Twitter’s Compose Dialog
For users like me, who don’t use DuckDuckGo as their search engine, that won’t work.
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1 + 1 = 2
Combining both ideas, I came to create a Custom Search Engine for Chrome that will allow me to quickly tweet from the Address Bar:
I’ve define a CSE so that the tw keyword will directly go to Twitter’s Compose Dialog. To define this CSE yourself, go to chrome://settings/searchEngines and add a new CSE with the following details:
Search Engine: Compose Tweet
Keyword: tw
URL: https://twitter.com/compose/tweet?text=%s
From now on you can compose a tweet by simply typing tw This is a tweet in the Chrome Address Bar.
Combine that with CMD+L, just like Šime did, and you can quickly tweet out links:
Visit URL
Hit CMD+L to focus the Address Bar
Hit CMD+← to put the cursor before the URL
Type in tw (with space) and hit enter
Cool!
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Call to developers
I see lots of uses for this. You could create these kind of productivity shortcuts to go quickly to Twitter profile pages, visit NPM packages, auto-archive URLS on The Wayback Machine, etc. (Ab)using CSEs like this once again underlines the importance of bookmarkable URLs and the ability to precompose data along with that.
Do note that many sites (such as the mentioned Twitter, GitHub, NPMJS, etc.) already provide CSEs to actually search them. Same goes for WordPress blogs, such as this one right here: simply enter bram.us searchterm in the Chrome Address Bar and after hitting ENTER it’ll search this blog for the given searchterm.
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I don't do this for profit but a small one-time donation would surely put a smile on my face. Thanks!
Keep staring at a bright source of light in the evening and your sleep cycle gets delayed. You forget to be tired until 3am. Then you wake up at 11am and when the evening rolls around you simply aren’t tired because hey, you’ve only been up since 11am!
Given enough iterations this can essentially drag you into a different timezone. What’s more interesting is that it doesn’t seem to keep rolling, once you get into that equilibrium of going to bed between 3am and 4am you tend to stay there.
And that’s just one of the three reasons mentioned 🙂
Jessica Hische, freelancer, in search of the ultimate day-schedule:
When I moved to San Francisco I was suddenly surrounded by people with “real jobs”, who didn’t have the flexibility I had (and who loved filling their weekends with fun non-work-related activities). I found myself, more and more, conforming to a normal office work schedule, running into the same problems I had the last time I kept a 9-6 workday (i.e. giant unproductive blocks of time before and after lunch), but compounded by all the additional running-your-own-business daily bullshit.
She reorganised her day schedule using a few basic rules (such as: “No deadlines on Mondays”), resulting in a tight – but more importantly workable and productive – schedule, packed with for fun and for work moments.
