Posts Tagged ‘shortcuts’

Sometimes, it’s easier to create an alias when working with the Unix command line. Having to create these every time seems to defeat the point of having a short alias though. Luckily, you can make them persistent.

Lets assume that we are using a user called mike. We need to be in our home directory.

cd /home/mike

The .bashrc file should be in there, but hidden.

ls -a

You should be able to see it listed. Now lets edit it.

vim .bashrc

And add a command in, for example, to save our usual CVS update command.

alias upd='cvs -q update -P -d'

Now save and exit. After that, every time you log onto the box you can use the upd command to run the CVS update.

One feature of Firefox I’ve just found about is smart keywords. If you hadn’t heard about them easier it is basically a way to run searches on any site you like from the address bar.

Basically, you go to a website you want to be able to search without visiting, select the search form and select add a keyword for this search. For example, on Amazon (I’m using Amazon because the stock example is IMDb and I wanted to do something different :p), you could enter “amazon” and then to search via your address bar you would just type amazon digital cameras and it would bring up said page.

A lot of obvious sites to do this with are already in the quick search bar on Firefox but I don’t find I ever use this even when I’m searching these sites because you have to change it away from Google before you search and then change it back to Google after you’re done and in the time you have done that you could have just typed in the URL of the site, especially given that can be done via keyboard shortcuts and if there is one for selecting a different quick search engine, I don’t know it and can’t imagine it would actually be much of a shortcut if it does exist.

While I don’t think it’s particularly useful to be able to search Amazon or IMDb this way as I don’t actually visit them that much, the more I got thinking about it the more I started thinking of sites that it would be useful for. Notably, Wikipedia, Mininova and eBay – all of which I go to one of my recently visited pages at on that site just so I can get to the search bar. I mean, who ever really wants to look at the Wikipedia homepage? I’m guessing it will also work with the search on Facebook too.