WebSearchQuickey

App-independent hotkey for an instant web lookup.

Copyright (C) 2015-2018 Dominik Chlebowski

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

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Description:

The purpose of this app is to make web lookup against any text phrase really easy and really quick. In practical terms, when you deal with text and you encounter a word or phrase you wish to search for, usually you'd need to open your browser and navigate to a desired search page, select and copy the interesting piece of text and then paste it in the search box, sometimes switching between the app with your text and the browser at least once.

WebSearchQuickey reduces all this tedious hassle to an absolute minimum. All you need to do is to have some (preferably meaningful) text selected and trigger the search with a hotkey. You can do it from any application or opened file, as long as it allows selecting and copying plain text, be it a word processor, spreadsheet, web browser, mail client, notepad, help file, PDF reader, even database. The search results will be shown in your default browser (in a new tab, if it happens to be already open).

Current settings (Google search engine and Win-S as the hotkey) are shown in the tray tooltip and can be modified through the "Settings..." dialog accessible from tray icon context menu.

You may also need to add an exception to your anti-virus, firewall etc.

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Installation / Removal:

Web Search Quickey doesn't require installation, just unzip it to any folder on your disk or pendrive and run. It also doesn't use registry, all settings are stored in wsquickey.ini file, in the same folder as the executable.

If you wish to launch Web Search Quickey automatically when the system starts, create a link to wsQuickey.exe and add it to your %USERPROFILE%\Start Menu\Programs\Startup folder.

To remove Web Search Quickey, follow these simple steps:

• Make sure to close it, in case it is running (right-click the tray icon and select "Quit" from the menu).
• Delete the folder containing the wsQuickey.exe along with all the other files.

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Known issues:

• Pressing the underlined accelerator key while tray menu is shown (e.g.: S for "Settings...") sometimes fails to produce any effect.
• Some advanced text editors (for instance EditPlus) sport a feature that keeps the current line persistently buffered, as if it would be copied every time the cursor moves to a different line, without actually performing any explicit copying instruction. Such feature may interfere with wsQuickey intended operation, when no text has been selected, and result in its confusing behaviour. Consult respective editor help file for further reference.
• WebSearchQuickey won't co-operate with portable browser instances. Search queries are handled by the default system browser. Currently there is no way to choose any browser different than the default.