Like many Perl coders I always find myself searching the CPAN site for modules and their documentations. Couple of day’s back I came to know about an easy way to create quick-search tags in Firefox and first thing which came to my mind was optimizing my everyday CPAN lookups. In this article, I would like to demonstrate how quick-searches are created and how I implemented the same for CPAN.

You can also directly visit the CPAN search page however if you are coding in Perl regularly and visit CPAN search page as frequently as I do then this tip would come real handy.

Step 1: Quick Search for CPAN Modules

Fortunately, Mozilla Firefox lets you create shortcuts that make browsing and searching much easier. To set up a Quick search, go to CPAN search engine page using Firefox, then right-click inside the search input box and choose "Add a Keyword for this Search..." as shown in the image below :

Then, enter a title for this new CPAN module search and a keyword ( I used cpan ) you'll use in address bar to execute it, as shown below :

Once you press the "Ok" button, your CPAN Quick search is created and then you can search for Perl modules straight from Firefox address bar, just type :

cpan query-string

Step 2: Quick Search for Module Documentation

If you type http://search.cpan.org/perldoc/MODULE_NAME then it generally takes you to the module’s documentation. However, you need to be careful while typing module-name because this search is case sensitive. This quick-search comes handy, when you are already using the module and want to look at its detailed description.

In this example, we will straight away create a new quick-search bookmark by entering all required values as shown in the figure.

Now you can search any module's documentation by just entering perldoc in the Firefox address bar

perldoc MODULE_NAME

CPAN quick search bookmarks have proven quite helpful to me while coding and I am sure this can be applied to many other sites that you frequently visit, like Secguru's Search Page.

Hope this helps :)