Traditionally, a search engine was used by typing in the site’s address or clicking a bookmark, waiting for the page to load, clicking to select the search field, typing the query, and hitting Enter. That’s two separate page loads, and a whole lot of unnecessary mouse movement and clicking or typing.

More recently, browsers have started providing a built-in search box, into which you can enter a query and get results with only one page load. That’s a big improvement, but the box takes up a fair amount of useful screen space. If you use more than one search engine, constantly clicking to select between them also makes the process a lot slower than it could be.

Fear not: there is a solution which reduces the time taken for the entire search process to just a second or two! Mozilla Firefox calls this feature smart keywords.

To provide an example I use every day, at Anchor we use an internal ticketing system called Request Tracker. I’ve created a bookmark for it with the keyword “rt”. If I want to view, say, ticket #112358, I just hit Ctrl+T for a new browser tab, type rt 112358 into the location bar, and hit Enter. Minimal page loading, and no mouse usage necessary!

The feature in Google Chrome is pretty similar to that of Firefox. The setup for Opera seems a little more complicated, but hey, they probably implemented it first, right?

Internet Explorer is, naturally, a little more perverse. While keyword search functionality is actually built in to the browser (and called “search prefixes”), there’s no way to set up prefixes apart from editing the Windows registry. There also seems to be an almost total lack of documentation on the subject; the only official information I could find was this four-year-old blog post. Thankfully, it mentions that TweakUI (a very handy Microsoft tool also largely lacking documentation) will allow you to add prefixes, through a slightly nicer interface than direct registry hacking.

Finally, the Mac OSX browser, Safari, doesn’t appear to have anything like this feature built in, but naturally plugins exist to solve the problem. The best one I found is called Keywurl.

Fear not, salvation is at hand! Although many Web 2.0 sites providing text-editing will save drafts and provide a reasonable text editor, nothing beats your favourite text editor of all time, Vim. Or Emacs. Or whatever you would prefer to use. Why shouldn’t you be able to use any text editor you like? It’s your computer and your time after all!

If you are using Firefox, your problems are over. Introducing It’s All Text. Install this handy plug-in to your Firefox, set the default editor to your liking and you are off and running! Now any text box on any webpage will show a small edit button on the bottom right corner allowing you to launch the editor of your choice. Edit to your heart’s content using the tools you are most familiar with, then save and exit the editor and have all your work sent back to the browser text box.

Even if the browser crashes mid-edit, your editor program will be unaffected and your work will be safe. You can save your work in the editor in addition to any swap or draft files it creates for even more safeguards.

It’sAllText works in Firefox 3.0. If you have older versions of Firefox you may wish to check out MozEX which is a similar plug-in.