Day 12: Supercharge Your Browsing Productivity with Firefox Templated Bookmarks

Last updated Jan 18, 2023

• Productivity
• Dev

This is an essential technique any Poweruser should know.

Yet the only person I know of using this built-in feature, is my Bioinformatics Professor. That was 4 years ago. And this trick still proves useful even after all this time.

Firefox allows you to assign keywords to bookmarks. Google Chrome call this customized search engines. For instance, I can open my Youtube favorites page by typing yf in the address bar.

Duh, that’s what bookmarks are for. What’s so special about it?

Wait, it gets better. You can not only open specific pages more quickly. You can also template the bookmark with placeholders. The placeholder %s will get replaced with the search query after the keyword.

This means you can search directly in Wikipedia by using this URL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s and assigning a keyword, such as wiki. This results in less context switching and less disruptions to your thinking.

Awesome! Now I can open my favorite Wikipedia Article with wiki Cryptocephalus gibbicollis.

Well … yeah. There are other cool use cases tool.

• Search directly on Youtube/Amazon/Google Maps/Wikipedia/..
• Calculate stuff with Wolfram Alpha wr: log(10)
• Jump to a specific Jira Ticket with jira TICKET-ID
• Launch a fresh Google Doc with :gdoc
• Search for research papers in IEEE ieee: paper
• Open the Gitlab File Finder of my dot-files repo dot
• Get the Bibliography from a DOI doi: 10.1080/02626667.2018.1560449

1. Open https://alternativeto.net/
2. Search for TEST in the pages search bar
3. Now Bookmark it. It should look like this: https://alternativeto.net/browse/search/?q=TEST
4. Open up the Bookmark manager (Ctrl+Shift+o)
5. Replace your search term with the placeholder %s, like: https://alternativeto.net/browse/search/?q=%s
6. Add a keyword, such as alt:
7. Now search for alt: google drive in the Address bar.

As basic as this feature is, it’s value increases if you apply your imagination and creativity.

Take a moment and consider how your workflow could benefit from working more efficiently with your bookmarks.

First published on Typeshare. See Part 1 and Part 2.