Hacker News Reader

Comment by davidgrenier | Hacker News Reader

Recently switched to firefox and am quite happy to see it has lots of feature I didn't think it had.

Chrome allows me to do use the built-in search engine of any website supporting it by pressing tab and then typing my search query. In firefox, it seems what I have to do is type my search query than use my mouse to click on the wikipedia icon (or amazon/etc). This also requires me to setup said search engine in firefox preferences. Ain't there anyway I can get that search experience using only the keyboard?

View on HN

The search box is separate in Firefox (next to the address bar). You can get to it by typing Ctrl+K (Cmd+K on Mac). Once you type your query, you can use the Down Arrow or Tab key to navigate to the site/engine you want to use and then hit Enter. You can also rearrange the order of those search engines to make the frequently used ones easier to reach.

If you don't mind a network round trip, you can also setup DuckDuckGo as your default search engine and use bang commands [1] to do different kinds of searches on many sites.

[1]: https://duckduckgo.com/bang

Fantastic, did that.

You can do this sort of search in Firefox as well. Right click on pretty much any search box, then click "Add a Keyword for this Search..." You'll get an add-bookmark dialog that you can put a keyword into (e.g. "w" for Wikipedia) -- I like to save the resulting bookmark in "Unsorted Bookmarks" so that it doesn't clutter up my menus. After that just typing "w Firefox<enter>" in your address bar will bring up the Wikipedia page for Firefox.

In the search settings you can setup shortcuts, like 'y' for youtube.

Then you can just type 'y rick roll' to make a search.

Alternatively, set your default browser to duckduckgo.org and use it's bangs, no need to manually add shortcuts!

The previous example would then be '!y rick roll'.

Ctrl + k, type search query, press tab, select search engine or add the one on the current page if it has any.

Much obliged.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com