qwiklinks

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Firefox Addon / Chrome & Edge Extension

qwiklinks

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Access long URLs with short, easy-to-remember names.





Demo

Demo

Why

qwiklinks was built as a way to help people get around in their browser faster. Instead of having to memorize URL prefixes or randomly typing in keywords until the search bar autocompletes the URL, you can simply associate the URL with a short and memorable name. In a sense, qwiklinks are similar to bookmarks, but don’t require you to use your mouse, take up no screen space, and don’t force you to sift through a sea of bookmarks to find the one you’re looking for.

If you’ve used GoLinks, you can think of it as a “personal” alternative to their product. For a more in-depth explanation of the benefits over using bookmarks, see their website and blog post for resources written by those much more proficient in the ways of persuasion than I.

Usage

You can use qwiklinks either through an extension on your browser, or as a background service on your local machine (latter is not recommended for now).

Extension

The qwiklinks extension allows you to access your links through the browser search bar. Simply type qw <name> and hit enter to load the corresponding URL. A list of suggestions matching what you currently have typed will appear as you type the name.

qwiklinks Search

Installation

Arguments

You can specify arguments by inserting placeholders such as $1, $2, and $3 in your URL. To use these placeholders, simply type the arguments after the qwiklink name, separated by spaces; for instance, qw mail 0 replaces all occurences of $1 in the “mail” qwiklink URL with 0.

qwiklinks Extension Popup

Dashboard

The qwiklinks extension provides a dashboard to manage your links.

  1. Click the extension icon on the browser toolbar
  2. Use the _dash qwiklink (qw _dash)
  3. Open the extension’s options page.

Errors

If you see a red outline around your field

Import/Export

You can export your links to a file, which can then be shared across browsers or with other users through the import options. On Firefox, the import options will only appear when the dashboard is open in its own tab (due to some limitations of popups for security reasons).

There are two types of import options:

Roadmap

Development

Development is done Firefox-first, with the Chromium code being generated using scripts/pkg-chromium.sh. The codebases for the two extensions are practically identical, with a few differences.

Scripts

All scripts live in the scripts/ directory. You can run chmod +x scripts/*.sh to allow direct execution.

Background Service

Use of this is not recommended for now. Unless there’s demand for this, development will be on hiatus. It’s missing a lot of features and is also a hassle to set up relative to the browser extensions.

Enables browser-agnostic link redirection through the qw/ prefix.

Setup

Roadmap