How often have you wanted to Google some term in the document you’re working on, or look up the documentation for a function? Many of us have a few Elisp functions to do this but you end up with a lot of duplicated code and the corresponding maintenance problems.
Harry Schwartz, who we know from his chat with Sacha, addresses that problem in his latest talk to the NYC Emacs Meetup. The talk, Searching the web with engine-mode, is about Schwartz’s engine-mode. What happens is that you define a site you want to search along with a single key that tells engine-mode to query that site. There is a key prefix, nominally 【Ctrl+c /】, that invokes engine-mode and waits for the final key to specify the site.
I like this approach because rather than have a bunch of complicated key sequences to memorize, you just pick a key that suggests the site: 【d】 for DuckDuckGo, 【g】 for Google, 【w】 for Wikipedia, and so forth.
You can see Schwartz’s configuration here. As you can see, he has a lot of sites defined. It would be a pain to write separate Elisp for all of them so engine-mode is a win if you like to make such searches.
Schwartz shows the details in the video so it’s worth watching. It’s about 18 minutes.