&Krishna.Tateneni; &Krishna.Tateneni.mail;
&Yves.Arrouye; &Yves.Arrouye.mail;
2002-10-16
3.1
KDE KControl enhanced browsing web shortcuts browsing

## Web Shortcuts

### Introduction

&konqueror; offers some features to enhance your browsing experience. One such feature is Web Shortcuts.

You may already have noticed that &kde; is very Internet friendly. For example, you can click on the Run menu item or type the keyboard shortcut assigned to that command (Alt F2, unless you have changed it) and type in a URI.

Uniform Resource Identifier. A standardized way of referring to a resource such as a file on your computer, a World Wide Web address, an email address, etc....

Web shortcuts, on the other hand, let you come up with new pseudo URL schemes, or shortcuts, that basically let you parameterize commonly used URIs. For example, if you like the Google search engine, you can configure KDE so that a pseudo URL scheme like gg will trigger a search on Google. This way, typing `gg:my query` will search for my query on Google.

One can see why we call these pseudo URL schemes. They are used like a URL scheme, but the input is not properly URL encoded, so one will type `google:kde apps` and not `google:kde+apps`.

You can use web shortcuts wherever you would normally use URIs. Shortcuts for several search engines should already be configured on your system, but you can add new keywords, and change or delete existing ones in the enhanced browsing control module.

### Use

There is a single tab in this control module. The title of the tab is Keywords. This tab features two main boxes, one for Internet Keywords and one for web shortcuts.

#### Web Shortcuts

The descriptive names of defined web shortcuts are shown in a listbox. As with other lists in &kde;, you can click on a column heading to toggle the sort order between ascending and descending, and you can resize the columns.

If you double-click on a specific entry in the list of defined search providers, the details for that entry are shown in a popup dialog. In addition to the descriptive name for the item, you can also see the URI which is used, as well as the associated shortcuts which you can type anywhere in &kde; where URIs are expected. A given search provider can have multiple shortcuts, each separated by a comma.

The text boxes are used not only for displaying information about an item in the list of web shortcuts, but also for modifying or adding new items.

You can change the contents of either the Search URI or the URI Shortcuts text box. Click OK to save your changes or Cancel to exit the dialog with no changes.

If you examine the contents of the Search URI text box, you will find that most, if not all of the entries have a `\{@}` in them. This sequence of two characters acts as a parameter, which is to say that they are replaced by whatever you happen to type after the colon character that is between a shortcut and its parameter. Let's consider some examples to clarify this idea.

Suppose that the URI is `http://www.google.com/search?q=\{@}`, and `gg` is a shortcut to this URI. Then, typing `gg:alpha` is equivalent to `http://www.google.com/search?q=alpha`. You could type anything after the `:` character; whatever you have typed simply replaces the `\{@}` characters, after being converted to the appropriate character set for the search provider and then properly URL-encoded. Only the `\{@}` part of the search URI is touched, the rest of it is supposed to be properly URL-encoded already and is left as is.

You can also have shortcuts without parameters. Suppose the URI was file:/home/me/mydocs/kofficefiles/kword and the shortcut was mykword. Then, typing `mykword:` is the same as typing the complete URI. Note that there is nothing after the colon when typing the shortcut, but the colon is still required in order for the shortcut to be recognized as such.

By now, you will have understood that even though these shortcuts are called web shortcuts, they really are shortcuts to parameterized URIs, which can point not only to web sites like search engines but also to anything else that can be pointed to by a URI. Web shortcuts are a very powerful feature of navigation in &kde;.