Every few weeks or so, someone will see me type something like this into my URL bar …

 1 # search apidock.com for "Fixnum" within Ruby
 2 apirb Fixnum
 3 
 4 # search GitHub for "twitter"
 5 github twitter
 6 
 7 # do a Google Local search for "Subway" in Phoenix, 
 8 # displaying a list & a map of Subway locations
 9 gloc Subway, Phoenix
10 
11 # do a Google Image search for "Puppies"
12 gim Puppies
13 
14 # search amazon.com for "Pragmatic Programmer"
15 am Pragmatic Programmer

… and they’ll say “Whoa, how did you do that? Did you setup Firefox keywords?”

“No,” I say. “It’s YubNub. You should check it out.”

I’ve been using YubNub for a few years now and I love it. I found out about it back in 2005 when Jonathan Aquino created YubNub as his submission for the “Rails Day” 24-hour programming contest.

Here is his original blog post which does a great job of describing YubNub:

“YubNub is a command-line for the web. After setting it up on your browser, you simply type “gim porsche 911” to do a Google Image Search for pictures of Porsche 911 sports cars.”

“I was tired of setting up the same Firefox keywords on each of the 5 computers that I use. By putting my keywords into YubNub, I can hit “am mark twain” for an Amazon search, or “gmap vancouver” for a Google Maps search, no matter which computer I’m on.”

If you want to be able to simple type wp javascript to go directly to the Wikipedia JavaScript page (or use any of YubNub’s other commands), then checkout http://yubnub.org and/or watch this screencast!