URL Shortcuts in ELinks
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## URL Shortcuts in ELinks

One extremely useful and convenient feature in ELinks, which may not be very well known, is so-called URL rewriting. If you give ELinks a URL (by passing it on the command line, through the -remote magic device or, most frequently, by typing it to the Goto URL dialog), it has the ability to mangle it in certain ways before processing it. This mangling is called URI rewriting.

### What it does

The URI rewriting can expand certain URL shortcuts to complete URLs. For example, if you type sd to the Goto URL dialog, it will be rewritten to:

    http://www.slashdot.org/

first, and then loaded. /.'s front page will be displayed.

Further, if you type g elinks to the Goto URL dialog, it will be rewritten to:

    http://www.google.com/search?q=elinks&amp;btnG=Google+Search

and then loaded, therefore, a Google search for the keyword elinks will be performed. Note that you can separate the g by either a space or a colon, so g:elinks will do the exact same thing.

A large number of those shortcuts are already defined for you. You can browse Protocols :: URI Rewriting :: Dumb/Smart prefixes in the Options Manager for a complete listing of already defined shortcuts (press the [Info] button on a shortcut to see what it will be rewritten to). See below for details on how to enable or disable this rewriting and how to define your own shortcuts.

### How it works

All the URI rewriting can be controlled by options in the protocol.rewrite option tree.

In the case of sd, a URI rewriting mechanism called dumb prefixes is used. If protocol.rewrite.enable-dumb is true, ELinks looks at the contents of the protocol.rewrite.dumb.* tree, and if it finds option protocol.rewrite.dumb.sd, it will use its value as the target URI.

Therefore, more generally speaking, if ELinks looks at protocol.rewrite.dumb.<typed_string>, and if it exists, will replace the entered URI with it. These dumb prefixes can be used as a kind of alternative bookmark systen - if you want to have fast access to a certain site and you don't want to spend a while navigating the bookmarks manager, you can just fire up the Goto URL dialog, type the shortcut and there you go.

A dumb prefix can contain %c, which will be replaced by the URI of the current document. This is used, for example, in the arc dumb-prefix, which provides a shortcut to the Wayback machine at archive.org.

In the case of g, a slightly different URI rewriting mechanism called smart prefixes is used. If protocol.rewrite.enable-smart is true, ELinks looks at the contents of the protocol.rewrite.smart tree and, if it finds option protocol.rewrite.smart.g, it will use its value as the target URI.

The difference is that the smart prefixes can take arguments and reference them in the target URI. As with dumb prefixes, %c in the URI means the current address. Additionally, %s will be substituted by the whole string following the prefix (elinks in the g example above; %s is by far the most frequently used expansion), while you can reference individual space-separated arguments with the codes %0 thru %9. Finally, if you want a plain % to the resulting URI, use %%.

Note that the prefix searched in the protocol.rewrite.smart tree is everything in the typed address up to the first space or colon (so bug:123 and bug 123 are identical). These prefixes are generally useful for searching anything very fast - be it Google (g:foo, gi:foo, gr:foo, …), ELinks Bugzilla bugs (bug:1234), the RFC database (cr:foo), or the Czech-English dictionary (czen:foo). The only limit is your imagination.

### Alternative URI rewriting mechanisms

In the past, before this was implemented, Lua scripting did the job. And you still have complete control over the URI in the internal scripting goto-url hook. The advantages are clear - you get complete control over the URI and you can do many more interesting things with it. For example, there are some very advanced CVSweb and Debian package database URI prefixes implemented in the sample Lua hooks file. The one disadvantage to this is that you must have Lua scripting enabled in order to make use of it, and many users don't have Lua installed.

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