Some time ago, I wrote a post to show how to modify terminator to enable easy google searching. However I have trumped myself and have an even better solution now. Google Search from any application. Modus Operandi is: Highlight Text => Press Key Combination => Script picks up the query from the clipboard => Formats the query and opens the URL in your defualt browser.
Lets start with the script. Copy-Paste the below code into a file (Lets name it google_search).
#!/bin/bash
QUERY=`xclip -o | tr ' ' '+'` #sanitize the query, change spaces to the plus sign
QUERY='"'$QUERY'"' #put quotes around the query, exact search
if [ -x ~/bin/open_browser.sh ]; then
open_browser.sh http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en#hl=en\&q=$QUERY
else
x-www-browser http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en#hl=en\&q=$QUERY
fi
Copy the file to the bin directory under your home directory. Make the script executable.
cp google_search ~/bin chmod +x ~/bin/google_search
Now lets take care of a few dependencies.
Install xclip. This utility is used to interact with the clipboard.
sudo aptitude install xclip
Update x-www-browser. See this tutorial for more instructions.
sudo update-alternatives --config x-www-browser
Now lets create a keyboard shortcut for the script we saved earlier.
Tutorial for KDE Users
Tutorial for Gnome Users
Thats it. Now you can highlight any text and press the keyboard shortcut you created in the last step and a google search for the selected phrase will open up in your default browser.
