Protip: Keyboard-activated, cross-browser bookmarks

November 26, 2010

I’m a web developer. That means that I use at least 3 different browsers every day. And maintaining a set of useful bookmarks across all those browsers is a pain in the arse. Also, I tend to prefer typing over mousing. It’s generally quicker. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a set of bookmarks that I can use in any browser, and access from the keyboard?

Here’s what I did to get this working. I installed <a href="http://lifehacker.com/238306/lifehacker-code-texter-windows">Texter</a> (made by Adam Pash of Lifehacker). Texter is a little background app that does text substitution. You type foo and hit Tab, and it gets replaced with bar. Or whatever you like.

After you’ve installed Texter, you set up your bookmarks. You make a hotstring (Texter’s word for a thing to replace) for each of the URLs you want to bookmark. You might, for example, have one for your production environment, one for dev, and one for staging. And while you’re at it, one for Gmail, one for your blog and one for Twitter. Then you just type in your shortcut and hit Tab, and the URL is there.

Nice work. Well done. I’m proud of you.

There’s a lot more that you can do with Texter. This is just one example. Explore and have fun. :)”