Open specific documents from address bar

🌟Features
1

Problem

You’re working on something. You want to open up a Dynalist document. You know which document you want, but to open, right now, you must first:

  1. Type in dynalist.io into your search bar
  2. Stare at the loading circle, waiting and looking for the document to load
  3. Open Go To, type foo, and navigate to your document

That Step #2, waiting for the document to load: That’s annoying. It can make you lose your cognitive state. It puts distance between intention and action.

Solution

Redirect URLS like dynalist.io/goto?q=foo to the first match for the document/bookmark matching Foo. This way, we can register a custom Google Chrome search engine, and voilĂ : Our streamlined process looks like this:

  1. Type in dynadoc TabfooEnter, and you’re done!
2 Likes
2

Quick workaround:

  1. Go to your list/document

  2. Copy the URL

  3. Right-click in Chrome’s address bar and click “Edit search engines”

  4. Scroll to the end of “Other search engines”

  5. Enter a name, then the word you would like to type to trigger this, then paste the URL

  6. Now when you type “foo” in the address bar and hit Enter, you’re going straight to that pasted URL :slight_smile:

2 Likes
4

@rudd One can even bookmark a document and open it by searching for the bookmark’s name.

Of course, this workaround too suffers from the flaw of requiring all Dynalist bookmarks and documents to be configured and kept updated manually.

5

yeah, or you can enter https://dynalist.io/#q= as a search engine to search from anywhere.

Don’t think it is a (big) bother to keep these things bookmarked: the places you want to jump to tend to be fixed, over time.

As for me, I have a windowed bookmark for dynalist and have it open in its own app-like window all day. I have my keyboard’s Menu button mapped to it (using AutoHotkey. When I want to enter something, hit the menu key, DL pops up, go where I need to be, hit menu to make it go back to the taskbar.

6

Be sure to use https://dynalist.io/#q=%s for it to work as expected.

7

The bookmarking solutions is still quite hacky. Doesn’t work for all documents, I have to remember to add them or wonder why it’s not working.

Can we implement the dynalist.io/goto?q=foo URL to really make using Dynalist in all of its web-app glory seamless?

8

I think something like this would be best addressed with a full API implementation rather than trying to fill individual use cases as the arise. And probably easier to maintain in the long run. :slight_smile:

1 Like
9

Yeah, I agree.

@Yatharth_Agarwal: Even if it’s implemented like that, there are probably other problems. What if “foo” doesn’t match anything? And the loading could be slow, since it searches in addition to loading.

I can understand the use case, but I think it could be better solved with a browser extension rather than using URLs, no matter if you want to capture an idea or quickly check a note.

1 Like