Quick Search for Javadocs in Firefox

Here’s a very neat trick to quickly open Javadoc documentation for particular Java class, in Firefox browser. I got it from Dmitri and been using it for years. Basically, it adds a “Quick Search” bookmark to Firefox, with shortcut to invoke it.

So, open up your Firefox bookmarks and create a new one, with the following info:

This is it. If you look at the link closer, you’ll notice that we just use Google search for “(Java Platform 5.0)” on java.sun.com site in “I’m feeling lucky” mode.

Now, any time you enter in the Firefox, for example,

jd String

it will get you to the javadocs for java.lang.String. :) In most cases you don’t even need to fully qualify the class name!

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 12th, 2007 at 2:24 am and is filed under Java. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Quick Search for Javadocs in Firefox”

  1. Keith Says:
    April 12th, 2007 at 6:43 am

    Cool! You may also want to check out this greasemonkey script:
    http://www.teria.com/~koseki/tools/gm/javadoc_isearch/index.html

    Greasemonkey is a firefox extension that allows arbitrary script execution. The script above provides a nice little input box on JavaDoc sites, so you can look up classes in the same manner as you do in an IDE. Very Handy!

  2. Ashok Shetty Says:
    April 30th, 2008 at 5:02 am

    Cool. Thank you for sharing this tip.

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