Trip

Trip is a tiny windows utility that will allow you to get to things faster.

Trip Screenshot

What Trip Does

Trip is a simple piece of software that will instantly present you with a free-floating text input field when a hotkey is pressed. From there you can type URLs or 'quicksearch' URLs like those that appear in Internet Explorer and Firefox. You can also use Trip to launch regular executable files/shortcuts as you would using the windows Run dialogue. Opening Trip is faster and less obtrusive than waiting for your browser to open and finding its URL field (the Trip textfield is automatically selected for you).

Quicksearches are prefixes (often single-letter) you can add to terms you type in to send that term to a website. For example, if you type '. cheese' your browser will open to a google search for 'cheese'. Likewise, if you type 'w chess', your browser will open the wikipedia 'chess' page. Trip does not integrate with your browser's quicksearches, as FireFox doesn't support launching quicksearches from the commandline, so in the interests of being fair, the quicksearches are internal to Trip, and are defined in trip.cfg

Trip differs from the Windows run dialogue by letting you type URLs or email addresses without the 'http://' or 'mailto:' - you can also put shortcuts to files or directories in your Trip folder and launch them by typing their name.

Trip will close itself if you press ESC, or switch to another window. Trip will not stay resident in memory.

How to Install Trip

  1. Download it (version 0002, 10 May 2005, 18KB)
  2. Extract it wherever you want
  3. Create a shortcut to it on your desktop by holding alt and dragging the trip executable to the desktop
  4. Create the hotkey by right-clicking on the shortcut on your desktop and entering the hotkey (I use Ctrl+Shift+A)
  5. Press the hotkey to activate.
  6. Edit and review the quicksearches in trip.cfg

New YubNub Trip!

For use with the YubNub command line for the web, this version of Trip redirects all your commands to this online service. Download it here. Use the instructions above to get it working most excellently.

Notes

Microsoft Anti-Spyware will scan Trip every time you launch it, causing delays of up to a second. This makes Trip most useless.

Who Wrote Trip

Glen Murphy - glenmurphy.com | glen@glenmurphy.com