tpaxman / bash-browser

Open browser to a site or search result from bash in WSL

bash-browser

This repo contains a script for opening your browser to a site or search result from bash in WSL. It allows you to either open to a webpage or to a search result on that webpage.

Usage syntax:

The first argument is the keyword for the website (google, youtube, gmail, etc.) and all following arguments are optional search terms:

./browse.sh <website keyword or url> <search terms separated by spaces>

Usage examples:

./browse.sh google                     # opens up https://www.google.com in your default browser in Windows
./browsh.sh google how to foo a bar    # opens up a search result for "how to foo a bar" on google.com
./browse.sh youtube                    # opens up https://www.youtube.com
./browsh.sh youtube we are the world   # opens up a search result on youtube.com

Compatible websites:

Currently the following websites are supported (because they're the ones I use most):

• google
• github
• whatsapp
• dynalist
• youtube
• reddit
• gmail
• stackoverflow
• imdb

Any other website can be accessed by including its full name (i.e. www.nba.com)

Note, some sites will work by just typing the suffix (i.e. nba.com and www.nba.com will both work since the first redirects correctly but nhl.com will not redirect to www.nhl.com and will fail)

You can also try to search a website by adding more arguments after the site name keyword which will by default try to append /search?q= to the url, since this is pretty common syntax, but it is not guaranteed to work at all.

Alias suggestions

In your ~/.bashrc file, you can add the following to make it easier to run the most common commands, adapted as needed:

alias www='/path/to/this/repo/browse.sh'
alias google='www google'
alias gmail='www gmail'

which allows you to run commands like:

google how old is alec baldwin
gmail from:[email protected]