2005-05-26

Adding search engines to Firefox is so easy that it's embarrassing. As noted before, I'm using Atlassian's Jira at work to track issues in the software and being able to search through them straight from the browser is pretty useful. To be able to do this yourself, create a file called jira.src in your firefox searchplugins directory with the following contents:

  <search
     name="Jira"
     description="Jira Search"
     method="GET"
     action="http://yourbox:port/secure/QuickSearch.jspa"
     queryEncoding="utf-8"
     queryCharset="utf-8"
  >
    <input name="searchString" user>
  </search>

To adapt the file to your situation:

• Adjust the action, i.e. enter the correct hostname and port (if something else than the standard port 80)
• Adjust the queryEncoding and queryCharset fields; linux boxes are usually set to utf-8, while Windows installations in the Western world use win-1252

To quickly search using the keyboard:

1. Press CTRL-J or CTRL-K to go to the search box
   
2. Pound CTRL-Down one or more times to select the Jira search option
   
3. Type a few keywords and press Enter

If you put the Jira logo in the searchplugins directory, that'll be shown instead of the spyglass when picking your new Jira search plugin.