Re:Emacs, Google this
by sooheon on Sunday May 01, 2016 @07:48AM
(#11605824)
I use Launchbar (https://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html) for this. It works system wide, I just select the word or phrase and tap the Option key once. This brings up Launchbar with that text inputted, and then I can send that off to Google, Wikipedia, the system dictionary, YouTube, or anything else. I love it because instead of having different convoluted keybindings for every different type of search (C-c / g, C-c / h, etc.) I only have one, and then dispatch off a fuzzy frecency search that takes <2 letters for the result I want. So tap Alt, Tab, g, Enter searches Google, while Alt, Tab, w, Enter searches Wikipedia, etc. It does tons more with this same paradigm, I use it more than the command line, and can't recommend it enough to people who like to optimize their computer use.
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I use LaunchBar and didn't know about this; cool! For those who also didn't know about it: it's the 'Instant Send' feature under 'Shortcuts' in the preferences.
It doesn't seem to work for words selected in the terminal, though, like in vim, or a scrollback buffer in tmux or less (you can click-and-drag to highlight things, but I mean highlighting in the apps themselves, like `viw` in vim to select the word under the cursor). That would be very nice.
Wait -- you need an app for this now? Ever since NEXTStep, Mac OS X has had the "Services" entry on the menu which can do things like this. Is that gone now?