Chrome - Custom Site Search Shortcuts
About
Wouldn’t it be nice to instantly jump to your Gmail or calendar by entering “m/” or “c/” in Chrome’s search bar? Or search for all your old pull requests by typing “pullrequests Prettier” (push space to activate search) … you can set these up pretty easily!
- Inside your Chrome work profile go to: “…” → Settings → Manage Search Engines and Site Search (chrome://settings/searchEngines]).
- Click the Add button.
- Enter a new shortcut.
Hot Tips
I recommend these two styles:
m/- (for Gmail - https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox) - Use the backslash when you just want to go to that page (like your Gmail inbox), not search the page. This works well for single letters… and will still show an autocomplete up until you hit the “/”. Maybe you don’t want Gmail but Google Maps. But type “m/” then enter and you’re in your Gmail inbox.gmail- (for Gmail SEARCH - https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#search/%s) - If you want to search a site, you can put “%s” into the URL and it will inject it… it’s a great option where you can now type “gmail Bob” (notice the Space) and it will search for emails with/from “Bob”.. but...... if you forget to type anything then it shows an error - which is stupid, but plus autocomplete is why I suggest you do backslash for the single letters where you just want to visit the site.
Sadly you can’t import in bulk, but here are some great ones to set:
My Chrome Shortcut List
Search Tabs
Notice also that there are three fixed options in the area already: “Books”, “History” and “Tabs”. The “Tabs” URL shortcut is especially useful for people who have many tabs, but are mapped to “@tabs”, which is long… so rename it to “@t” and then type “@t Git”... and it will take you to whatever tab best matches that (say the Github issue you had open).
Warning
I have >50 of these now but I had a weird error once where "m/" stopped working. You type it and it says "page does not exist". I don't think I changed the shortcut, so it was strange it stopped... and stranger still I have exactly the same entry on a different Chrome profile and it still works in the other profile. I eventually changed the URL to a shorter "https://mail.google.com/" (no # symbol as in "https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox") and that might have fixed it. However, a couple of other shortcuts were also not working... I wonder if a stray "%r" (I found one of these) or "tab" in one shortcut ruins others. It doesn't seem alphabetical - "i/" for Instagram was broken too, but I went through the list to see which ones worked, and most did. With brute force, I added/removed/slightly modified the broken ones and that apparently fixed it. Somehow. I feel like it might happen again, and there's no documentation anywhere on what causes this issue.
