An easy tip to quickly access the Python reference

If you are like me, you visit the Python Standard Library Reference all the time. You already know there’s a “datetime” module, a “random” module, an “os.path” module, and so on, so how do you quickly go there to read the reference? Here’s what I do.

I switch to my browser with Alt+Tab, I key in Ctrl+L or Ctrl+T, in the URL tab I type “p3 datetime”, and I press Enter. The whole procedure takes less than 3 seconds, and it immediately takes me to the Python 3 reference for datetime.

How to do it

Firefox: Visit https://docs.python.org/3/library/datetime.html and bookmark it. Go to the properties of the new bookmark, change the name to “Python 3 Library Reference”, specify “p3” in the keyword field, and in the URL change the “datetime” part to “%s”, so that the whole URL is https://docs.python.org/3/library/%s.html.

Other browsers: I don’t know, but the information is around (e.g. Chrome)

Actually I have a copy of the documentation on my local machine, so the URL I’m actually using is file:///usr/share/doc/python3-doc/html/library/%s.html.

I have such shortcuts for the Python 3 library, the Python 2 library, the Django settings (but the setting must be typed in lower case and with hyphens instead of underscores, such as “secret-key”), the Ansible library, and more.

Update

For the JavaScript/CSS/HTML reference, I use this search string on DuckDuckGo: \%s site:developer.mozilla.org . The backslash means “redirect me to the first search result”, similar to Google’s “I’m feeling lucky”. You first need to make a search without the backslash, so that you can see the resulting URL and bookmark it, and then go add the backslash to it and specify the keyword mdn. Then type Ctrl+L and mdn array and there you are, straight at the reference of Array.

This is a republication of an old article first published in my Django Deployment site.