Of late, I’ve been hunkering down and digging into the depths of Objective Development’s LaunchBar. It goes without saying that the utilty of the application is amazing.
(Note: If you are not familiar with LaunchBar and want to know what is all about, you should check out this short video or even this longer screencast for an overview).
LaunchBar’s “Search Templates” option provides a configurable interface to easily access the search functions of almost any website and comes with preconfigured search templates for many mainstream websites and search engines such as Google, Amazon, Wikipedia, Wolfram Alpha, and more. The power of the feature however is that LaunchBar makes it very easy to add custom searches for your own needs.
To give you an example — I realized the other day that LaunchBar does not have a default search template to search Gmail messages, and I was able to create one in about 5 minutes.
- Within LaunchBar, select Index > Show Index from the menu bar.
- Click Search Templates (UTF-8)
- Click Add..
- Under Name, type “Gmail”
- Under Details enter the following string (no quotes): “http://mail.google.com/mail/#search/*”
- Close the window and save the configuration before exiting.
That’s it. The next time you invoke LaunchBar, type “GM” and you should see an option to invoke a Gmail search template. Click the space bar and you will be presented with a text field to enter your gmail search string.
This template supports full gmail operators, i.e. from:, label:, etc., so give and as long as you are logged into gmail should work like a charm.