A Little Win

Isn’t it awesome when you find nifty little things that make the daily grind that teeny bit more smooth? This one might well be awesome for you.

TLDR;

• In Chrome or Chromium go to: chrome://settings/searchEngines
• Next to Other search engines there’s a button marked Add, click it!
• Give the new search engine a name. For example: Github pull requests
• Give it shortcut. For example: pr
• Next enter the url, including %s to be replaced when searching.
  For example:
  https://github.com/smartpension/projectfeelgood/pull/%s
• Finally, click Add

Now when you go to the address bar and type pr followed by an id, the browser will take you direct to the Github pull request matching the id.

Every Little Helps

When you do something quickly, you might not think about ways to make it more efficient. However, if it’s something you’re doing numerous times a day, the time saved all adds up.

I visit the same parts of certain sites multiple times per day, per hour even.

Chrome (and other browsers) have feature to help with this repetitive task. In Chrome these are known as search engines. A system that saves me time and hassle.
I use it for:

• GitHub PR’s
• Ruby Gems
• NPM Packages
• Heroku Review Apps
• Jira
• Ruby Doc

.. the list goes on.

Without a search engine, I would have to

• Open the site — perhaps I have a bookmark to click, but this could also involve typing some characters to trigger google search to find the site I want, then clicking the search result to take me to the site.
• Find the page — this means using my hands on the mouse, my eyes to find the links and little bit of brain power to navigate to where I want to go.
• Find the thing — now i need to read a list or perhaps do a search for the item on the page I want, then I finally click it.

The above process can take a fair few seconds to complete to reach your end goal. With a search engine I can go directly to the page I want in a few keys strokes and save valuable time and brain cycles.

Search Engine URL

When defining a new search engine within the browser the URL is key. For this tip to work you need to ensure the site you are using has as URL you can harness, so that it can have part of it replaced with the text you search with. This excludes any URLs and require POST requests or specific headers.

One search engine I use required a username and password to access. I can still use the search engine by including the username and password in the URL, in the following example I specify the user as poweruser with a password of P0werP4ssWord9

https://poweruser:P0werP4ssWord9@somesite.org/tickets/%s/view

Take the time to set up a search engine and give it a try, I would be surprised if you did not thank yourself!

Ben