In this mini-series I will walk you through some habits I replaced in recent times, which have shown to pay off and make me a more productive programmer/power-user of my computer. All these changes should be easy to gradually adopt, so I would highly recommend checking them out. If you’ve any suggestions ☝️ or improvements ✍️, then email me at hi@aknapen.nl or reach out using any of the social media listed here.
DuckDuckGo is often advocated as the privacy preserving alternative for Google. Besides protecting your privacy it also has a really cool feature called Bangs, which acts as a shortcut to query some commonly used websites.
Bangs work by prefixing your search query with a ! followed by a short code to identify which website you would like to query. To give some examples:
!w turing opens the Wikipedia page of Alan Turing.!wa derivative of x^3 query Wolfram Alpha for the derivative of x cubed.!enes time translates “time” from English to Spanish using Google Translate.!so python try-catch searches StackOverflow for “python try-catch”.!g meaning of life query Google search for the meaning of life
!i flower get images of flowers.
I hope these examples give you a feel on how you can simplify querying specific services to find what you need faster.
You can find more about Bangs, including a list of all available Bangs, on DuckDuckGo’s website.