Keyboard Maestro quick search
At any given time, I tend to have a couple of browsers open, at least two or three windows in each, and then a whole bunch of tabs in each window.
One way of cutting down on this kind of thing (which seems to take up a horrible amount of computing power) is to organise the way links are filed away.
The other angle of attack is to stop yourself from opening them in the first place, and its with that in mind that I put this Keyboard Maestro macro together.
The idea is pretty straightfoward – you trigger it with a keypress (I'm currently mashing together Ctrl+Alt+CMD+Space, because I'm kind of overloading the modifiers+space combinations), it auto populates with whatever is in the clipboard, and you then choose one of four vertical searches.
The results then pop up in a simulated iPhone window, which stays on top of all other windows. Which means that;
- It is a politely condensed version of the web page to take up a minimal amount of space on your screen,
- You can still see whatever you were doing before you were struck by the urge to look something up on Wikipedia - which means you are less likely to get distracted by whatever else you come across on Wikipedia
- It won't let you distract yourself by spawning another bunch of tabs of interesting-looking links - you can only have one page open at a time,
- Because it stays on top, you can't ignore it – when you're finished with whatever you're looking up, you have to close it. You can't leave it cluttering up your desktop without it getting in your way.
