!mdnio
Published
tl;dr Use the !mdnio bang on DuckDuckGo or Kagi as a shortcut when searching MDN.
I’ve been a DuckDuckGo user for a while — one of the killer features that initially drew me in were the bangs.
Put simply, bangs are shortcuts that allow you to direct your search somewhere specific — typically another site. For example, !w is semi-frequent one that I use to search Wikipedia.
I do a decent amount of web development and as such spend a fair amount of time on MDN reading documentation. Using DDG’s bangs, one could use !mdn to search MDN itself, but I never really liked using their builtin search.
And so I would use mdn.io which is essentially an “I’m feeling lucky” search for MDN e.g. you send it a query and it gives you what would be the first result from the search engine. What I really like about the interface is query is just the entire path after mdn.io e.g. I could use mdn.io/splice when I forget exactly how to use the JavaScript .splice method. In a moment of brief irony, as of writing, mdn.io itself uses the bare ! DDG bang to navigate to the first result.
I’m sure you can see where this is going, right?
Back in 2019 I submitted the !mdnio bang to act as a shortcut to the shortcut of using mdn.io itself. Well, it’s still going 5+ years later and I realized I never shared it on this blog.
As an aside, Kagi supports bangs including most (all?) of the DDG ones, so !mdnio flies on Kagi too.
That’s all. May your searches be more refined & efficient and your results relevant.
🖖
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Last modified #programming #productivity #web