Yesterday, we were bouncing ideas back and forth on Twitter regarding a specific ticket on WordPress’ Trac system. At one point, a developer lamented the fact that Twitter didn’t automatically link “#18149” to http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/18149.[ref]If you are talking about Trac tickets in any WordPress-related IRC channel, a bot will automatically fetch the ticket’s title and URL for you. It’s quite handy.[/ref]
I jokingly commented that someone should come up with a Chrome extension to do just that. Apparently, something that does that already exists.
https://twitter.com/#!/helenhousandi/status/116979340759146497
I’ve never used Firefox keywords, so I had to do a bit of Googling just to figure out what we were all talking about. But apparently, Chrome supports custom search engines and shortcuts in the address bar.
You’ve probably noticed that sites you search the most end up being auto-loaded as search engines. Whenever I type “amazon.com” I see a hint:
If you hit the tab key, the address bar will change to a search form and automatically perform your search on Amazon.com. This is exactly the kind of functionality I wanted for Trac, and there’s an easy way to add it!
- Right click on the address bar
- Select “Edit Search Engines”
- Set up a custom search enging
Since I wanted to work with Trac, I set up a custom search engine that keys off the keyword “wptrac” and automatically searches for a Ticket specifically (rather than searching milestones, changesets, etc).
Now, whenever I type “wptrac” into the address bar, I’m prompted to “Press Tab to search WP Core Trac” and can automatically jump right to tickets. Pretty nifty, huh?
