Search everything with dmenu

Posted on 2022-04-11

Yes, this is another post about my current project, mastersearch. But as progress was pretty good in the last two days, I thought I would just post a update.

Dmenu

I integrated mastersearch into dmenu, which means you will not even have to open a terminal to search everything anymore. Everything is just one keybinding await, if everything is set up correctly. This upgraded my personal use of this project from "maybe, do not know yet" to "definitely using it all the time". This was a pretty small change, but definitely made a huge difference.

Supported Websites

The number of supported "websites" also grew a lot. "Websites" is here in quotes as I also coded one non-website, the Linux command `apropos` as a search for man-pages. This was mostly as a proof of concept, but may definitely be useful for someone out there.

Furthermore, like mentioned in the previous post, I also integrated a real search engine into mastersearch. I chose DuckDuckGo as Brave search blocked my requests. This also greatly improved usability.

Anyway, here is the current list of supported providers:

apropos

crates.io

DuckDuckGo

GitHub

StackExchange

WikiMedia (modified to also work with the Arch wiki)

Wanted Websites

I really want GitLab to be working, but for some reason, searching on GitLab will need a authentication token. This means that I will need to make some adjustments in the backend first. Apart from GitLab, I would also like to get the Rust standard documentation doc.rust-lang.org working, but they do not seem to publish a API, so I will need to scrape it manually. I have already done that for DuckDuckGo, so this will likely be my next goal. Apart from these two, I really do not know what else is worth supporting. Any ideas? Just let me know.

AUR

I also wanted to publish `mastersearch-cli` and `mastersearch-dmenu` to the AUR. This may also happen in the next few day, or maybe never as I have never packaged something for Arch. But I will definitely try it out. I may also consider not publishing it to the AUR if it seems that I am the only user of this software (like it currently seems).

Future

I do not know if I will continue making blog posts about this project. Just informing you about some new websites is probably pretty boring. I may do another post if something really big changes (like the dmenu integration today), I may not. May the future decide.

Like mentioned in the previous post, the source is available on both GitLab and SourceHut:

GitLab

SourceHut

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