Spider

Spider is a tool for web search on your favorite sites.

The idea is pretty simple: quick web search. It was born out of a desire to rewrite this zsh web-search plugin.

For example, I often look up the meaning of English words on https://dictionary.cambridge.org/, but sometimes I am too lazy to go to my browser, go to the site and type in the word I want to search for. There can be many such search sites besides cambridge.org.

Thanks to spider, I can collect all the links in one file and quickly use it on terminal. For example you can create file with site names and urls, like this.

google          https://www.google.com/search?q=
duckduckgo      https://www.duckduckgo.com/?q=
github          https://github.com/search?q=
ecosia          https://www.ecosia.org/search?q=
goodreads       https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=
stackoverflow   https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=
wolframalpha    https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=
archive         https://web.archive.org/web/*/
scholar         https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=
multitran       https://www.multitran.com/
cambridge       https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/
urban           https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=

And then you can use spider.

A tool for web search on your favorite sites.

Usage: spider-web-search <COMMAND>

Commands:
  web   Search on the web
  list  List web sites in the spider file
  help  Print this message or the help of the given subcommand(s)

Options:
  -h, --help     Print help
  -V, --version  Print version

Examples

Open spider github repo

spider-web-search web github meinbaumm/spider

Find meaning of word healthy

spider-web-search web cambridge healthy

Google about Rust

spider-web-search web google "rust language"

If you want to open main page of website instead of long url for search, just don't write search term. This will open the main page instead of https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=

spider-web-search web urban

Show your web urls provided in web-search-urls.spider file

spider-web-search list

How To

How to define in which file to store web search urls

Spider will look for the web-search-urls.spider file in the current directory where the binary is located.

Also you may set the environment variable SPIDER_FILE. Just add this line to your .profile file:

export SPIDER_FILE="/home/username/web-search-urls.spider"

How to install Spider

You can download suitable executable from https://github.com/meinbaumm/spider and copy it in some directory that is listed in your PATH (e.g. ~/bin).

You may also use cargo to install spider from crates.io:

cargo install spider-web-search

How to build Spider

Spider is written in Rust. You may build it yourself with the help of cargo. Just clone this repository and execute the cargo build command in its main directory:

cargo build --release

How to use spider instead of spider-web-search

Spider now has the name spider-web-search in crates.io. But I prefer just spider more. To avoid writing spider-web-search every time, you can add an alias to your .bashrc or .zshrc file.

If you installed spider with cargo:

which spider-web-search

Then copy the output and in your .bashrc or .zshrc file write

alias spider="~/./.cargo/bin/spider-web-search"

Next source file like. And use with pleasure :)

source .zshrc