quick access to better man pages (or any search) opera EDIT

[fitzhugh]

EDIT:
NEW URL:
http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/tpl/cgi ... nux&db=man
This might be better, a matter of taste regarding format. Very inclusive, unlike die.net there are no adds

MUCH SIMPLER INSTRUCTIONS:
see next few posts in thread.

Regular opera users may know this already, though I have to admit it took me a little while to find out it was available.
This is one of the things that makes me install opera right away when I rebuild puppy, the ability to get to custom searches with all of two keystrokes + search term.

After setting it up, which takes moments, just do the following to search man pages:

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  control-l

  (lowercase L) which moves your cursor to the URL window

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  man [command] <enter>

  (no single quotes) as in

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  man rm <enter>

That's it. I used man because that is habit for getting man pages but can be something else, including just m, as long as it doesn't conflict with the name of another custom search.

To set this up go to ***edit - easier way, skip to my next post for instructions ***

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tools: preferences 

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Search tab.

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New

expand the

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Details

section
enter a

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name

for keyword put

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man

and for the url enter

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http://www.die.net/search/search.cgi?words=%s

Note that you must include

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http://

or

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https://

The

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%s

is replaced by the string you type in the url field after typing the keyword and is passed to the url you are requesting, so it becomes

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http://www.die.net/search/search.cgi?words=rm

in the example above.

You can do this with any site by looking at the url and seeing what to replace. Note, however, that some sites don't like spaces,
Wikipedia is one, just replace space with _ as you enter the search term if you set it up.
I changed d to open download.com and use w for

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search/%s

so that typing

w puppy_linux

works, but

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w puppy linux

is actually treated as

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w puppy+linux

I'm sure there is an answer to that, probably using post instead (which is an option I haven't bothered with).

The default searches of this sort in opera all have & placed randomlyin the name. It is not displayed, and I have no idea why it is there (anyone know?) but it works fine without it as well.

Try other sources of man pages if you like. I've set up a linux man pages swicki but there is a bug at the moment preventing me from configuring it so that it works better than the above single-site search, but when they fix it (and they will because it is a significant bug) I'll be pointing man that instead of the die.net as in the example.

One more note: Puppy uses busybox, a multi-function utility that takes the place of a large number of normal linux commands. If you don't know this yet it is because links have been set up so that when you call a function busybox replaces it actually calls busybox. It is transparent to the user except that busybox has been stripped of some of the less used options for some commands, meaning you might not be able to use every option for a command you find online. It is also the primary reason I did this, since currently when you type man rm in puppy you get the busybox man page and have to scroll to rm (or whichever command you are trying to learn about. That alone isn't a big deal, but the busybox man page only includes the Options section of the relevant man page, and often I need more than that.

hmm, maybe I'll try configuring man to open and call this instead when called from the command line, though when not already running opera takes a while to open on my computer (~10 seconds), so I'll add it as oman instead of replacing man.

I hope someone will find this useful. If you know of a better way to do it, or a better online man page collection, please let me know.

Thanks,
Fitzhugh

[raffy]

Useful, yes, especially if used to search Puppy Linux sites, a ready way of doing so will help a lot of Puppy users.

Thanks for this.

[fitzhugh]

Useful, yes, especially if used to search Puppy Linux sites, a ready way of doing so will help a lot of Puppy users.

Lobster has already set up a good puppy linux swicki:
[url]http://puppy_linux-swicki.eurekster.com/[/url]

It runs the search from puppylinux.org/wiki (Search, not Search Wiki)

Silly of me, turns out adding a new one even easier than the way I did it before, and I never noticed it... how often do you right click on a search field anyway??

I'll use Lobster's swicki as an example:

open [url]http://puppy_linux-swicki.eurekster.com/[/url]
right-click on the search field and select "Create Search" from the menu (at bottom)
enter the keyword you'll type in the url field to use it (I used p for this one, for example)
click "OK"
That's it! talk about simple...

To use it just go to URL field and type
p install cd
to search for any puppy pages that include those terms, and rather than hunting around for that page you know you saw last week, there it is in a list of puppy related pages. Either that or burried somewhere in the:
"Results 1 - 10 of about 107,000,000 for install cd."
from google!
107 million pages. Lobster is saving us a LOT of time.

With swicki you can make highly customizable searches, and I actually set one up for man pages to post but due to a bug I get better results with just the one page at the moment, since you can't lock out the whole rest of the web when creating new searches right now. I've had a dialog with their tech support over other issues (it is beta still) and their very responsive and want to see it work, so should be fixed soon.
Lobster: thank you for the swicki.

[fitzhugh]

I forgot:
adding the new search field to the tool bar is easy as well. You have to have your personal bar showing. Right click on personal bar and select "Show Searches".
Select the search you want to add, such as the swiki or man page search, and then it is there. You can also right click on searches already on the personal bar and remove them.
I regularly use the one provided for google, as well as those I've added for man pages, wikipedia, Lobster's swicki and (though my spelling doesn't reflect it), dictionary.com

Once swicki is fixed (works now for most things, just not what I am after here) I'll add one to search specifically for missing libraries that packages need.