Show HN: QuickOWL – Quickly open favourite URLs with selected text as input

5 points by bprasanna 3 years ago | 2 comments

QuickOWL (https://quickowl.app) is a custom contextmenu extension/add-on, for browsers & Thunderbird Email client, to quickly open user defined web links (URLs) with selected text from a browser/email as input.

Inspiration: The inspiration behind developing this extension was: work related bugs or tickets which come in plain text format in emails or internal work portal reports. In order to open the bugs/tickets which are plain text, the usual steps followed are:

1) copy the bug/ticket number

2) open the respective internal bugs/tickets portal

3) paste the copied bug/ticket number and hit a button to do the search or to open it directly

Above scenario is only for bugs/tickets, if our work or day-to-day life demands such copying and pasting of text across websites we will be wasting significant amount of time on this process. The QuickOWL extension/add-on aims to remove the steps 1 & 2, and directly sends the selected text (bug/ticket number) to respective bug/tickets portal as input.

derekzhouzhen 3 years ago |

For the few websites that I need to do frequent posting, I just write a bookmarklet for each. It is one line of javascript.

This can be useful for people that don't want/don't know to code though.

bprasanna 3 years ago | |

Thank you for the comment. Bookmarklet is a quick solution, but competes for area in bookmarks bar. This extension/add-on helps those on both the sides of web technologies. Even if one know or doesn't know bookmarklets, the experience of opening a URL through a contextmenu is an unique experience to explore.