# Keyboard shortcut to search box?



## vedlos

Hello,

I'm not sure this is the right place to ask, but I've been looking around and didn't find any "technical" section. Anybody know if there's a keyboard shortcut to place the cursor in the search box? If it did, WR would definitely be my favorite website forever.

Thanks in advance.


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## Egmont

If you press Tab a few times, it will end up there. The number of times you have to press it will depend on where your mouse pointer is to start with, but unless you have an accessibility feature enabled to have the pointer stop on every clickable object on the page, it won't be many.


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## vedlos

Thanks, Egmont, I already tried, but when you have been scrolling and/or clicking on links to open new tabs it may take quite a lot of Tab pressing. I just remembered that when you put the cursor over the search box a tooltip that says "Alt-(Shift)-S" shows up, although at least for me with Firefox it doesn't work.

I finally created a screen macro with PTFBPro which does the trick. Thanks anyway.


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## jann

Good question.  I don't have a answer... because I do something different.  You might be interested.

Rather than using the search box, I use search shorcuts in Firefox.*  CTRL+L places the cursor in the address bar of an existing window or tab (and if you open a new tab, CTRL+T, the cursor is in the address bar by default).  So I hit CTRL+L and then I type the appropriate search shortcut followed by the word I want to look up in the dictionary.  For example, I have my search shortcuts set up so that typing _enfr egregious _will load the EN>FR dictionary entry for egregious.  Note that you can use this technique to set up shortcuts to the WR conjugators as well, and that it spares you the trouble of selecting a dictionary in the dropdown list if you habitually use multiple dictionaries.

*Chrome shortcuts here.  Safari users, see here.


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## Peterdg

In Chrome, it works with alt-shift-W.


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## Kelly B

Peterdg said:


> In Chrome, it works with alt-shift-W.


Oh, nice. Thanks for mentioning this one.


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## vedlos

jann said:


> CTRL+L places the cursor in the address bar of an existing window or tab (and if you open a new tab, CTRL+T, the cursor is in the address bar by default).  So I hit CTRL+L and then I type the appropriate search shortcut followed by the word I want to look up in the dictionary.



Yes, I also use both CTRL+L and the indispensable WR shortcuts to different dictionaries. The thing is that because of my work sometimes I have to do a lot of searches, so I actually created a keyboard macro with PTFBPro which hits CTRL+L, types "enes" (in this case) and space, so I just have to type the word. But once again, sometimes I do several searches while in the same browser window, and I thought it would be nice to have a way to just go to the top of the page and have the cursor in the search box, just so the page doesn't have to load again each time.

As you've seen by now, I'm a bit of a keyboard nut.  But it really speeds up work. Sometimes the trip to the mouse is such a drag... Thanks anyway, Egmont and jann.


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## jann

Since most of the page content needs to repopulate anyway, you shouldn't see a big difference in load times for using search shortcuts vs. using the search box.  The search shortcuts might sometimes be more convenient if you, as I, occasionally end up loading an auto-complete item that you don't want from the search box.

While Alt+Shift+W doesn't work in FireFox, I realized while testing that you don't have to click in the search box to place the cursor there; mousing over the search box is sufficient.  I find the cursor automatically places itself in the search box at the very end of the page load (i.e., after all ad content loads), so if I take a second or two scanning the definition and don't actually click anywhere on the page, the cursor is generally in the search box anyway.


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