Thursday, June 28, 2012

Searching Bugzilla Faster with Firefox Keywords

Just a few ideas that can make searching for bugs faster.

1) Use the shortened url

Simply enter the url: bugs.eclipse.org/######
where ###### is the bug number and bugzilla will open the full url (https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=######)

2) Install the quick search plug-in

From the main page just hit the link: Install the Quick Search plugin.

3) Use Firefox keywords for advanced searches

In Firefox, open up the bugzilla search page and right click on the search field.  Select "Add a keyword for this search".  This will create a bookmark that you can access directly from the address bar using whatever key word you chose.

Assuming you use 'bug' as a keyword, entering bug 123456 will take you directly to that bug.  Entering 'bug import package' will search for bugs with the words in the summary.

Assuming you are logged in, you can use your saved advanced search settings to get more specific results.  My default advanced search only looks at certain products/components, so I have a separate keyword for this narrowed search scope.

You can also craft more complex search urls and save them as bookmarks to save a variety of search settings.  See Firefox's zine entry on keywords.

Hope this helps save you some time!