Customizing Opera

The Opera browser is my preferred browser as of now, with its low loading time and in-built support for mouse gestures and so many other small good things; it has established itself as the best choice for my taste. Even though it is great as it is out of the package, it helps a lot to customize it to iron out some quirks.

1. Adding Wikipedia quick search option

One of the neat things of Opera is that you can provide a quick search option, using which you can just provide a prefix letter and type your search term straight from the address bar; no need for any specialized area for making your search. Want to search google? or Yahoo!? or Answers? you can do just all this just by providing the appropriate prefix and typing your search term from the address bar (e.g., just typing "g vijay shankar ganesh" would search the term on google whereas providing "y vijay shankar ganesh" would search the same term on Yahoo!).

But, what escapes my logic is that how come they missed adding Wikipedia to the pre-built quick search options? Well, anyway its not much of a problem, all you need to do is Tools -> Preferences (Ctrl + F12) -> Search and then add the following details:

Name: Wikipedia Search

Keyword: w (w is by default used for download.com search, I seldom use it so I change w to use Wikipedia instead)

Address: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s&go=Go

That's it, press OK and now you can just type "w" proceeded by your search term and you will be directly taken to the appropriate Wikipedia article if that's found or else it will take you to the result page of Wikipedia Search.

2. Open Folder option for transfers

Another one of those options which obviously needs to be present by default, it makes you wonder why it's the not the case though. Once your download / transfer has finished downloading / transferring, the right-click option on the transfers screen only provides you with option to directly execute / open the file. I most of the time prefer opening the folder where the download has taken place and then do what's needed of the file. This can be accomplished by following the method described in the following blog post:

http://my.opera.com/Tamil/blog/open-folder-in-transfers-right-click

Cheers!