The slimSEARCH plug-in for slimKEYS is a beast sometimes difficult to maintain. The number of web sites you can search into evolves with time. Within a slimSEARCH hotkey configuration, you can add predefined search entries using the green plus sign without the yellow sparkle.
This will show you a list of all search entries that come with slimKEYS, and all the ones you manually created before.
Notice the “Update list online” link at the bottom? This fetches an XML file on slimcode.com that gives you more entries. I have updated this file only once since the release of the slimSEARCH plug-in, but it pretty much contains all the search entries I’m using. If you don’t find what you want, you can manually add new entries by using the second green plus sign with a sparkle, and select “Custom web search”.
This gives you a blank entry you must fill in.
It’s not that hard to find out what search pattern to use. Let’s take the Windows Marketplace for Mobile. Enter two distinctive words in the search box, like “foobar slimcode” and proceed with the search.
Without considering the actual result page, look at the destination URL:
This is the URL you must use as your search pattern. Do you see “foobar%20slimcode”? That’s what you must replace with “{keywords}”. In this example, the final search pattern is:
https://marketplace.windowsphone.com/search.aspx?keywords={keywords}
We used two words on purpose, to see how a space was encoded. In this case, it became “%20”. By default, slimSEARCH replaces spaces with “%2B”, the equivalent of a “+” symbol. You can test how the target web site handles “%2B”, or explicitly tell slimSEARCH to use another symbol by checking “Replace spaces with this character”. The Marketplace web site has no problems with the default “+” sign, so I’ve left it unchecked, and filled in the rest of the info.
Some notes: In the title, you can put an ampersand symbol (&) before a letter, so that you can press “Alt-That letter” within the slimSEARCH popup to use that search entry. The toughest part is finding a letter you didn’t already use! :) Alt-R was still available for me. I chose “mm” as the prefix command (for “Mobile Marketplace”). This allows me to type “mm grocery list” and press Enter instead of typing “grocery list” and press Alt-R (even though I rarely use prefix commands, except for the “@” symbol for Twitter user searches).
Also, make sure you move your new search entry above “Web Address Filter” and “Start new process”, by using the “Move search entry up” blue arrow button. These two special entries should always be at the bottom. The next version of slimKEYS will actually hide you these two special entries.
Do you have custom search entries? Share them here!