Developer Productivity Tips: GO Links
This is a tutorial on how to create your own personal search engines in the name of productivity! GO Links are kind of like bookmarks but you type them into the address bar. For example, if I want to navigate to my GitHub account instead of clicking to my bookmark or typing the full address I can just type go/git hit Enter and I can get to my site. You can also use them to automatically search other sights, for example to lookup your open GitHub pull requests.
I’ve worked at bigger companies that have something for GO Links built into the intranet that allows you to share GO Links internally and I found it very helpful so I started looking for a way to do it at home. There are many ways to do this and there is even a Go Links extension in Chrome which is simple to use but I prefer the approach described below because you can customize it to work as a specialized search engine.
Create a GO Link in Chrome
This way makes use of Chrome’s search engine settings. Essentially what you are doing is making a search engine that only has one result… the URL you want!
Steps
- Go to Chrome’s search engine settings page by clicking here chrome://settings/searchEngines
OR
right-click the address bar and select Edit Search Engines… - Scroll down to the “Other Search Engines” and click ADD
- Then fill out the fields
- Search engine can be whatever but I’d recommend starting it with the same prefix (like “GO -”) for all your GO Links just so they are grouped together which makes it easy to find them if you need to edit one
- Keyword is what you type into the address bar, it can be anything but I’d recommend starting it with “go/” or some kind on prefix you wouldn’t want to google search
- URL with %s in place of query is the address that you want to end at and as the label says you can use “%s” for query params and I’ll show that example after these steps
- Click ADD and try it out by typing your keyword in the address bar.
A Tad More…
So about the “…%s in place of query” part. Well you may have noticed after skimming through the Chrome search engine settings page that there are some familiar sites on there such as Medium.com. You can open these other search engines up by clicking the vertical dots > EDIT to the right of the search engine. You’ll notice how they use “%s” for query params.
So…how do you use that? Simple, type “medium” in your address bar and click space, you should see the address bar change then type a something to search like “hackernoon” and hit Enter.
I’d recommend utilizing this cool feature in your GO Links and this is one of the reasons I prefer creating GO Links this way as opposed to using the extension mentioned before. A couple ways I use it are for looking up:
- Pull Requests on GitHub by PR number or Jira ticket number
- Tickets on Jira by number
Summing it Up
This may only save a few seconds (as with many workflow hacks) but the main thing is that maybe it saves some brain power or sanity by not having to remember the URL for something or where to go to find your issue ticket when you open Jira. It’s simple. It’s worth it.
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