search duckduckgo (or google) via vim's keywordprg

K.md

Search DuckDuckGo (or Google) via vim's keywordprg

This will search DDG or Google (using Firefox) with the filetype+keyword and go to the first result

This is related to :help keywordprg and pressing K on a keyword

Probably you can swap firefox with chrome in the snippets, idk

Put this in your $HOME/.vim/vimrc and swap the commented out line if you don't use vim-dispatch

" don't mess with these filetypes (use the default keywordprg)
let ignorelist =['python','vim','help']

autocmd! Filetype * if (index(ignorelist, &ft) == -1)
  \ | let &l:keywordprg=":Dispatch " . fnamemodify($MYVIMRC, ":h") . "/search.sh " . &l:filetype | endif
  "\ | let &l:keywordprg=fnamemodify($MYVIMRC, ":h") . "/search.sh " . &l:filetype | endif

Store this as $HOME/.vim/search.sh and swap the commented out line if you prefer google

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# remove the +! from DDG or the btnI= from google if you don't want to navigate to the first result

firefox "https://duckduckgo.com/?q=${1//[.]/+}+%22$2%22+!"
# firefox "https://google.com/search?btnI=&q=${1//[.]/+}+$2"

Nice. I achieved similar functionality with ddgr cli and a vim command.

The gist of it is something like this:

command! -nargs=* DDGR terminal ddgr <args>

Which I also set as keywordprg (with DuckDuckGo's bangs, it's 😗👌):

augroup ddgr
  autocmd!
  autocmd FileType python setlocal keywordprg=:DDGR\ !python
  autocmd FileType go setlocal keywordprg=:DDGR\ !godoc
augroup END

Published as a minimal vim plugin: https://github.com/pbnj/vim-ddgr