QuickTip: Reuse Search Terms

As you probably know, LaunchBar allows you to perform any web search quickly and easily. Let’s select DuckDuckGo in LaunchBar and search for a – nowadays – rare species.

At Objective Development, our go-to search engine is DuckDuckGo, but sometimes it can be interesting to see what other search engines like Bing have to offer. Now we could select Bing in LaunchBar, press the Space key and type the search term again. But that wouldn’t be as easy as I promised. Instead of just pressing the Space key, press ⇧-Space this time. LaunchBar opens the text input again, but this time automatically adds our last search term. Pressing Return now shows the Bing search results.

⇧-Space is especially handy to modify the previously entered search term. If you don’t need to do that, then there’s an even faster way: Select your search engine of choice and press ⇧-Return to repeat the last search immediately. Boom.

By the way: This tip is not limited to web searches but works with nearly all searches and text inputs in LaunchBar. Calendar events, calculations, Maps,… to name just a few.