One of the things I loved about using Safari was that I could have items in my bookmark bar that I could invoke with ⌘1, ⌘2, etc. This was especially nice for things like bookmarklets. For example, I'm viewing an article that I want to read later, I could hit ⌘2 and save it to Instapaper.
Chrome has no such shortcuts for its bookmark bar, but it does have custom search engines.
The idea behind these is allowing you to set a search engine for something like Amazon and be able to type amazon⇥, enter a search term, and get your results without having to do it by manually typing into a search field on the site.
But it can do so much more.
Let's use the Instapaper bookmarklet as an example. Let's say I already have it in my bookmark bar.
- Go to Bookmarks > Bookmark Manager, or enter ⌥⌘B
- Right-click on the Bookmarklet and select Edit
- Focus on the bit that starts with
javascript:... - Select it all and copy it.
Now we create the custom search engine.
- Right-click on the address bar and select "Edit Search Engines", or go to Preferences and click "Manage Search Engines..." under "Search"
- Enter the following to the bottom of the list (you may have tons of things in here already):
- In the "Add a new search engine" field, enter whatever you want to call it. This doesn't matter in terms of functionality. In our case, we'll enter "Instapaper"
- In the "Keyword" field, enter the shortcut you want to use. I'm going to use "r" for "Read Later".
- In the "URL with %s..." field, paste what you copied from the bookmark earlier.
- Now you can close that browser tab.
Now when you land on a large article, you can highlight the address bar (⌘L) and then type your keyword "r" and hit return. Sure, it's a couple more keystrokes than just hitting ⌘2, but now you don't have to remember an arbitrary number.
I have several of these setup for things like "p" to save the current page to Pinboard, "of" to add a link to the current page to OmniFocus, "t" for Tumblr.
This is now one of my favorite features of Chrome, and I would have a hard time going back to Safari.
Thanks to Hernán Ciudad for teaching me this trick.
Enable syncing your custom search engines by tweaking things in chrome://flags/.
This is a Solutions Log post.