Searching GNU From Firefox

When writing up answers for Emacs related questions on stackoverflow.com, I like to include links to the info pages. I got tired of having to go to the gnu site and then do a google site-specific search. I tried looking for a Firefox search plugin that already did that (or something similar), but to no avail.

However, it's pretty easy to write the search plugin yourself. The main page for creating search plugins on mozilla's developer site gives you pretty much all you need to know, except for where to put the xml file. This page shows you that the installation dir is very likely C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins.

You can read the documentation yourself, or just check out the snippet of XML I wrote.

Probably the "hardest" part was finding an icon, and the all-knowing google led me to the www.favicon.cc web page, where someone had drawn the standard GNU icon and made it available under a Creative Commons license:

More Advice

Way back when I wrote a tip about Emacs Lisp's advice.

How I wish other languages had this capability. A couple of questions came up recently on stackoverflow.com that were (imo) best answered using advice. So, if you're struggling to see when to use advice, I think they're pretty good examples.

"Diff, save or kill" when killing buffers in emacs

Can I change emacs find-file history?

Dynamic Modal Bindings (auto prefixing)

A guy posted an interesting question on stackoverflow:

Most emacs modes include some sort of prefix to activate their features. For example, when using GUD "next" is "C-c C-n". Of these modes, many provide special buffers where one can use a single key to activate some functionality (just 'n' or 'p' to read next/previous mail in GNUS for example).

Not all modes provide such a buffer, however, and repeatedly typing the prefix can be tiresome. Is there a well-known bit of elisp that will allow for ad-hoc specification of prefix keys to be perpended to all input for some time? (Until hitting ESC or some other sanctioned key, for example)

Very intriguing, how does one go about solving that?

I don't think you want that (in general) because many of the prefix commands contain an extensive set bindings which clobber too many useful keys. That being said, I'm sure there are places this could come in handy.

I wrote up a solution that prompts you for a key sequence, and it promotes the prefix command keymap to the toplevel (associated with this particular minor mode). The minor mode is buffer specific, and it only allows one prefix command to be promoted at a time.

Check out my answer (won't put the code here in case I need to make an update).

stackoverflow.com

If you read Coding Horror or Joel On Software, you already know about stackoverflow.com. In a nutshell, it's a place where you can ask coding questions and receive answers quickly. You can also participate by voting answers up/down and answering questions.

stackoverflow.com works really well, the overall design is very simple, clean, and easy to use.

The emacs community there is pretty small, but questions do come up now and then. In general the answers are fairly good (I think mine are stupendous, feel free to look at them and vote them up).

Like any good (modern) web page, this one has plenty of RSS feeds. This is the feed I use to watch questions tagged emacs elisp emacs-lisp dot-emacs.