What SearchLink plugins should I make?

General Nerdery
1

I’m pretty into creating plugins for SearchLink right now… are there any folks would like to see? Anything you regularly have to switch from writing to your browser to get a link for is fair game. Some things are more searchable than others. GitHub/gists, man pages, DuckDuckGo first results, The Movie Database/IMDB… just to give examples of plugins that already exist.

I imagine someone will ask for Google Scholar search, but I’ve found that very frustrating to get the correct link from, even with very precise search terms. Plus Google makes it very difficult to pull search results outside of the browser these days. They used to have handy APIs for that kind of thing, but now I have to rely on DuckDuckGo’s backslash redirect and it’s nearly as pretty as it used to be.

2

I was wondering if it would be possible to have a snippet system like PopClip’s …

3

Tell me more, I’ve never used Snippets in PopClip.

4

It’s pretty ingenious – plain text snippets can create an entire plugin, using PopClip itself. So highlighting this and ithis creates a plug-in that searches Urban Dictionary:

#popclip
name: Urban Dictionary
icon: UD
url: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=***

They can also launch shortcuts, shell or javascript scripts, etc.

Here’s the documentation – probably a better explanation:

5

Ah. I recall that addition now. Is there anything you see that accomplishing that can’t be accomplished with SearchLink custom searches?

Those can be used to create site-specific searches which are essentially the same as a /search/ query on most sites, and can be used for straight url replacements as well with $term placeholders.

6

No, the custom searches would work for all the url replacements I can do with PopClip, I think. I had missed that – thanks!

PopClip snippets can go beyond URLs, but I’m not sure if that would be meaningful in SearchLink

Time to browse the documentation more!

7

Actually, writing plugins requires some Ruby knowledge, and abstracting them to YAML setups could make it easier to incorporate new searches. Especially now with the new Google integration, you can create custom site searches through Google that would be as easy to implement as pasting in the ID for your own search (once you had an API key in the config).

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