Table of Contents
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 menu item or type the keyboard shortcut assigned to that command (Alt+F2, unless you have changed it) and type in a URI. [1]
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: will search for my
querymy
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.
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.
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 to save your changes or 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: is
equivalent to
alphahttp://www.google.com/search?q=.
You could type anything after the alpha: 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.
[1] 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....
