Title: Using Text Expansion for URL Completion
Author: Alex Kirk
Published: September 1, 2023
Last modified: October 26, 2023

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# Using Text Expansion for URL Completion

September 1, 2023

In my professional life on the web, I tend to visit lots of the same URLs frequently.
While I have (most of) them bookmarked in my browser, I usually don’t navigate to
the bookmark and click it.

I start typing in the URL field of my browser ([Firefox](https://getfirefox.com))
and since autosuggest also searches the bookmarks, those are often visible. I realized
though that this is still often too slow and not straight forward enough: It happens
that many URLs are very similar and have the same first part, such as on Github 
many repos are under the same organization.

So a while ago I started using Alfred’s snippets to expand URLs for me. By using`/`
as a suffix^([1](https://alex.kirk.at/2023/09/01/using-text-expansion-for-url-completion/?output_format=md#45e48b7b-c831-4a8f-bd40-0b9b00a6f877)),
this allows for speedy expansion of URLs I visit frequently. A bonus is that the
same expansion works in other places where I need the URL, e.g. for linking it in
blog posts.

So, for example, I have the snippet `g/a/` to expand to [https://github.com/akirk/](https://github.com/akirk/).
If I then continue typing `fr`, my browser can autocomplete much more precisely 
because I have already entered part of the URL to [https://github.com/akirk/friends](https://github.com/akirk/friends)
which I often visit.

Hope this can serve as an inspiration!

 1. Although I natively speak German, I have switched to US (Intl for the inverted-
    L Enter key, I cannot let got of that one) keyboards a long time ago to benefit
    from dedicated keys for square and curly brackets, this also means I have a dedicated
    key for slash [↩︎](https://alex.kirk.at/2023/09/01/using-text-expansion-for-url-completion/?output_format=md#45e48b7b-c831-4a8f-bd40-0b9b00a6f877-link)

[Web](https://alex.kirk.at/category/web/), [Workflow](https://alex.kirk.at/category/workflow/)

[Alfred](https://alex.kirk.at/tag/alfred/)

Read this next

[Previous Post](https://alex.kirk.at/2023/08/31/1875240/)

## One response to “Using Text Expansion for URL Completion”

 1. [– Billy Wilcosky](https://wilcosky.com/2023/09/02/3951/)
 2. [September 2, 2023](https://alex.kirk.at/2023/09/01/using-text-expansion-for-url-completion/comment-page-1/#comment-84656)
 3. […] Reblog via Alex Kirk […]
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