How to search the manual more efficiently

General Usage
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I find myself using Julia’s online manual a lot, and thought I’d share this simple trick on how to do that more efficiently if you’re using Chrome as a browser:

  • Enter chrome://settings/ in Chrome’s URL bar.
  • Scroll down to Manage search engines. Click it.
  • Click Add next to Other search engines.
  • Enter the following and then click Add:
    – Search engine: Julia Manual
    – Keyword: jl
    – URL: ~~https://docs.julialang.org/en/latest/search/?q=%s~~ update: now https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/search/?q=%s
  • Now, in Chrome’s URL bar, type jl followed by space to enable searching in the manual.

This way, you can save three, maybe four seconds over if you use a bookmark. Over time, that’s a lot of seconds.

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Excellent suggestion. Firefox, of course, also has a similar functionality, just right click and “add a keyword to this search”:

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Nice tip !
FWIW it maybe more energy efficient (and faster) to link the jl search with local julia doc (JULIA_PATH/share/doc/julia/html/en/search.html).

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And don’t forget this:

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I have jl for the webpage, and j for the local copy.

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And for qutebrowser, add this to your config.py (thanks to @ExpandingMan):
c.url.searchengines["jl"] = "https://docs.julialang.org/en/stable/search/?q={}"

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I think it would be best if docs.julialang.org adhered to the OpenSearch standard to advertize itself as a search engine. Most mainstream browsers seem to understand this specification (which is used by Discourse, BTW).

In the meantime, I’ve put together a small webpage to provide OpenSearch specifications for the Julia Reference manual: http://ffevotte.github.io/juliaOpenSearch/index.html

I you go to the page, your browser should propose you to add a new search engine. In Firefox, it looks like this (in the top-right part of the window):

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Once the search engine is added. You can affect it a shortcut. Again in the example of Firefox, this is performed by clicking the “Change Search Settings” button visible on the screenshot above, or visiting the preferences menu (about:preferences#search)

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PS: the OpenSearch document for the Julia documentation is here, in case you’d want to inspect it beforehand: http://ffevotte.github.io/juliaOpenSearch/julia.xml

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I can’t recommend this enough, I’ve been using it for years with multiple languages (and even multiple Julia documentations, for different versions), the amount of time it saved me is incredible:

For platforms other than macOS and/or different pricing options:
https://zealdocs.org (free)
https://velocity.silverlakesoftware.com (nagware)

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I have used this wonderful tip for a long time but it just stopped working,
apparently due to some change in the julia docs.

Replacing latest with v1 in the URL made it work for me:
https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/search/?q=%s

I guess that will be OK until there is a v2?
(Personally I liked the reassurance of getting the “latest”…)

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@bennedich would you mind updating your original post to use the current URL so that people don’t have to scroll all the way to the bottom of this thread to find it?

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Thanks for bringing this up! As far as I can tell, I’m no longer able to edit my original post. You could perhaps flag the post for moderator attention and ask if they could edit it for us?

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ok, i’ve done that and we’ll see if it works!

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I’ve updated the URL in the top post.

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