Smart Bookmarks in Epiphany

Smart Bookmarks is an extension for the Epiphany browser. Admitedly, its name or description in the browser extensions panel does not help the user understand what exactly it is about. What is a smart bookmark after all?

In short, a smart bookmark is a dynamic bookmark. A bookmark which accepts an argument and returns results in accordance to the given argument. So, it is clear that this type of bookmark suits the needs of bookmarking a search engine’s URL that contains the necessary search term and returns results.

How to create a smart (dynamic) bookmark

This is quite easy. Assume that you need to create a smart bookmark that searches the archives of your favourite mailing list.

All you need to do is perform a search on that list for a distinctive sequence of characters. For example I searched the LGU list for the term AAAAAA:

AAAAAA site:http://lists.hellug.gr/pipermail/linux-greek-users/

Or better, you may want to use Google’s advanced search feature.

Now, all you have to do is bookmark (Ctrl-D) the results page, but before actually saving the bookmark, you should substitute the AAAAAA sequence with %s. (that’s two characters % and s)

%s will be substituted with the requested search terms every time the smart bookmark is used.

Now, your bookmark is a smart one and you may finally press the “Add” button to save it. All you have to do is type the search terms on the browser’s address bar and choose your smart bookmark from the bottom of the dropdown list that appears below the address bar.

Another cool thing you can do with a smart bookmark is to open the bookmarks editor (Ctrl-B), right click on your smart bookmark and select the “Show on Toolbar” option. A textbox should appear in your bookmarks bar, so you can search this resource quickly.

Finally, if you use the Deskbar applet, then you should know that this tool recognizes your saved smart bookmarks and lets you assign a shortcut to each one of them. For example, one could assign the “lgu” string to the aforementioned search on the mailing list archives. So now a search on the mailing list can be performed right from the desktop (deskbar applet) with the following:

lgu kernel

This will search the mailing list for all entries that contain the term kernel.

Smart bookmarks are a neat feature. I use this very frequently. This post was written for those who have overlooked this really useful feature.

How to create a smart (dynamic) bookmark

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