Backtick Is Like Launchbar For Your Chrome Browser

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Screen Shot 2013-11-18 at 12.05.34

If you’re using the Chrome browser on your Mac, then you might like to take a look at Backtick, an extension which lets you fire off bookmarklets with a few keystrokes. Like Alfred, Launchbar or Quicksilver on the Mac, Backtick lets you hit a key combo and type in a couple of letters to trigger a command. Only instead of launching apps and so on, it launches bookmarklets.

I mistakenly thought that Backtick (whose keyboard invocation is the ` key, hence the name) would give me keyboard access to my own bookmarklets, already stored in my bookmarks bar. But no, it needs you to add your own, making it just about as annoying as it is to add bookmarklets to Safari in iOS. But like any nerd automation (nerd-o-mation) service, it requires a bit of work up front to save lots of time later. Also, the extension comes with a bunch of built-in bookmarklets to get you started.

Why bother? Well, instead of having to click up in the menubar every time you want to save a page to your read later app, you can just hit the backtick and type, say, “inst” for Instapaper. Even better, you could have a bookmarklet each for Instapaper, Pocket, and others and trigger them all by typing “read,” and then selecting the right service from the pop-up list using the keyboard.

It’s just a shame it doesn’t work with Safari, especially as it’d be really great to keep my desktop-only bookmarklets out of the bookmarks bar so they wouldn’t sit useless on my iPad.

The Backtick extension is nagware, and will cost you $5 to remove the occasional messages.

Source: Backtick

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