Firefox and Trac

Search Plugins

Like all browsers, Firefox has a "search" box (usually to the right of the address bar) that one can use to search on specific search engines without first loading them. It's also quite straightforward to add custom search plugins. Last night, I made two such plugin files:

The first one takes a phrase to search for, and searches on trac for it. The second one is more useful -- given a number, it goes directly to the corresponding trac ticket. (If you enter something that doesn't exist, it will instead search for a hash symbol followed by your search query.)

These are easy to use: Firefox maintains a directory of search plugins. They're located here:

Here /Applications/Firefox.app should be replaced by the path to your Firefox app. I don't have another machine handy to find out where the directory is on Linux -- but here's the developer page about the feature, which would probably tell me if I were willing to read it:

If someone wants to find it there, and post the path here, everyone would probably appreciate it.

So now, once those two files are in place, you simply restart Firefox. Two new searches will be available (with Sage favicons!). You can simply use them as normal from the upper right corner, but that's not too exciting. Much more exciting: in Firefox 3 at least, you can bind a key shortcut to each of them. (I use t for speed-trac and trac for trac.) Once you do this, typing t 1000 in the address bar will immediately take you to trac ticket #1000, and typing trac notebook will search for notebook on trac.

Enjoy.