kguidonimartins / counsel-surfraw

Use web search engines from Emacs

What is this?

counsel-surfraw allows the user to search a number of search engines directly from Emacs.

Prerequisites

I'm assuming that at this point, you'll have installed ivy, counsel, and friends. This package requires ivy.

You'll need to install surfraw. On Debian/Ubuntu, that would mean

apt-get install surfraw

Just realized that right now there's a hard requirement on Emacs 25+ because I'm using seq.el.

Installation

;; Your typical procedure to install/load packages

(require 'counsel-surfraw)

;; Bind counsel-surfraw to a key
(global-set-key (kbd "C-c w") 'counsel-surfraw)

This is not on MELPA yet.

Usage

counsel-surfraw will prompt the user to enter their search terms, then will provide a list of search engines provided by Surfraw.

You may search for the thing at point by pressing M-p at the first prompt.

How to change the browser

By default, emacs should open links in the OS' default browser.

You can change that, or even open links in Emacs' browsers (eww, w3m, etc) by changing browse-url-browser-function:

;; open in Firefox
(setq browse-url-browser-function 'eww-browse-firefox)

;; open in Chrome
(setq browse-url-browser-function 'eww-browse-chrome)

;; open in EWW (built into modern versions of Emacs)
(setq browse-url-browser-function 'eww-browse-url)

Surfraw is missing some search engine I want!

Surfraw's default search engines (which it calls "elvi"; singular "elvis") look like... they came from Julian Assange's bookmarks. Wonder why. The point is, there's some stuff that is useful to me in there, and some that is not. But you can fix that semi-easily if you know some shell script.

If you want to make some search engine that is useful to you, you can copy one of the elvi; they live under /usr/lib/surfraw (on my Ubuntu box). You will want to copy it to $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/surfraw/elvi (create it if it doesn't exist). Then change the text/URLs/etc as needed.

By way of an example, here's a simple elvis I wrote to search jisho.org:

#!/bin/sh
# elvis: jisho 		-- Search Japanese dictionary
# Author: J. W. Smith

. surfraw || exit 1

w3_usage_hook () {
    cat <<EOF
Usage: $w3_argv0 [search-string]
Description:
    Surfraw search Japanese dictionary (jisho.org)
EOF
    w3_global_usage
}

w3_config
w3_parse_args "$@"
# w3_args now contains a list of arguments

url="http://jisho.org/"

if [ -n "$w3_args" ]; then
    escaped_args=$(w3_url_of_arg $w3_args)
    url="${url}search/${escaped_args}"
fi

w3_browse_url "$url"

There are more elaborate elvi, that take options, etc. counsel-surfraw does not do any of that, and thus if you're only using surfraw from counsel-surfraw, you don't need anything more complicated than the above.

Note that counsel-surfraw is expecting the format of that second line after elvis: to be something like "nameofelvi -- Search blah blah description". surfraw uses that text directly in surfraw -elvi, which counsel-surfraw parses to build the list of search engines.

Inspiration

Helm has a similar command in its main distribution.

Why not use DuckDuckGo bangs? Sounds similar, and has more stuff.

If DDG could provide some kind of API endpoint from which I could query the list of bangs and make it searchable from ivy, it would be a MUCH more robust option at this point. (For one, it'd work on Windows more easily.) Until then...