Firefox Add-on ContextSearch: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 21:55, 2021 December 11

Firefox extension ContextSearch provides customizable select-rightClick searches.

You select a piece of text on a page, right click, and choose the search engine you want to use. The very basic functionality is available in many browsers at least for the default search engine, but ContextSearch allows you to add additional search engines to this. Some use cases:

Search use cases

add your local library catalog to see if a book is available for loan, rather than being launched to amazon with a generic search
- search string I NEED TO ADD THIS FOR BOTH OVERDRIVE AND PAPER

go straight to google maps for an address search
- search string https://maps.google.com/?q=

go straight to google translate to see the translation of the selected foreign word
- search string https://translate.google.com/?sl=da#auto/en/

go straight to wikipedia for a search that would otherwise be polluted with sales spam
- search string https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&search=

search for the word on your own mediawiki
- search string https://<your wiki's URL>/index.php?search=

Stretch use cases

ContextSearch can do some other things in cases where the URL encodes actions, and the actions don't need to be in a specific order. For example, usually mediawiki opens a page in edit mode by appending action=edit to the end of the URL, like

https://wiki.squirrelslair.ca/index.php?title=Internal:Firefox_Add-on_ContextSearch&action=edit

but it will treat it the same if the URL has the action=edit before the title, e.g.

https://wiki.squirrelslair.ca/index.php?action=edit&title=Internal:Firefox_Add-on_ContextSearch

This means you can use the following search string to select-rightClick open a page in mediawiki using the following "search" string:

- for regular edit: https://<your wiki's URL>/index.php?action=edit&
- for PageForms edit: https://<your wiki's URL>/index.php?action=formedit&

Of course if you do this for a selected text that doesn't have a page on the mediawiki yet, it will try to create a new page for you.

@@ Line 6: / Line 6: @@
 You select a piece of text on a page, right click, and choose the search engine you want to use. The very basic functionality is available in many browsers at least for the default search engine, but ContextSearch allows you to add additional search engines to this. Some use cases:
+== Search use cases ==
 * add your local library catalog to see if a book is available for loan, rather than being launched to amazon with a generic search
 ** search string <code> I NEED TO ADD THIS FOR BOTH OVERDRIVE AND PAPER </code>
@@ Line 20: / Line 21: @@
 * search for the word on your own mediawiki
 ** search string <code> https://<your wiki's URL>/index.php?search= </code>
+== Stretch use cases ==
+ContextSearch can do some other things in cases where the URL encodes actions, and the actions don't need to be in a specific order. For example, usually mediawiki opens a page in edit mode by appending <code>action=edit</code> to the end of the URL, like
+ https://wiki.squirrelslair.ca/index.php?title=Internal:Firefox_Add-on_ContextSearch&action=edit
+but it will treat it the same if the URL has the action=edit before the title, e.g.
+ https://wiki.squirrelslair.ca/index.php?action=edit&title=Internal:Firefox_Add-on_ContextSearch
+This means you can use the following search string to select-rightClick open a page in mediawiki using the following "search" string:
+**  for regular edit: <code> https://<your wiki's URL>/index.php?action=edit&</code>
+**  for [[Mediawiki Extension PageForms|PageForms]] edit: <code> https://<your wiki's URL>/index.php?action=formedit&</code>
+Of course if you do this for a selected text that doesn't have a page on the mediawiki yet, it will try to create a new page for you.
 }}