S-bang

A Firefox extension that adds custom bang shortcuts to Startpage.

Requirements

Startpage as default search engine. Any Firefox based browser.

How to use it

Go to the Exstensions and themes (Ctrl+Shift+A). Go to the Preference option of the extension. You will find the page with three fields to fill:

• Service: the name of the service you wanna be redirected (ex: youtube, DeepL, maven, perplexity, wikipedia)
• Shortcuts: the sequence of characters it must preceded by "!" (ex: !yt, !dpl, !mvn, !px, !w)
• URL: the url to be redirected. Every site has its own structure so you need to search, understand and add it here

Then press the button "add". Open a new tab and search something on the site you wanna be redirected. Examples of search: !yt hello world, !dpl hello world, !mvn jdbc, !px hello world, !w linear algebra

Example

How it works

background.js:

• Intercepts the GET request to Startpage via webRequest
• Extracts the query from the URL (ex: ?query=!yt hello world)
• Separates the bang !yt from the search terms hello world
• Looks up !yt in the g_bangs in-memory dictionary
• Replaces {query} in the URL with the search terms and redirects

options.js:

• The user adds and removes bangs from the table
• Saves the data to storage with browser.storage.local.set
• background.js updates automatically via onChanged

Notes

The shortcuts work only from the omnibar.

This is a personal project, so it has not been published on the Firefox store yet.