Recently DuckDuckGo gave its UI a big overhaul. One of the new parts of the UI is the auto-suggestions, which are pretty cool, especially when working with !bang syntax. I want that in my conkeror webjump! So I started looking...

Turns out that Conkeror can work with OpenSearch descriptions to create webjumps and actually already has a DuckDuckGo OpenSearch XML file. However, DuckDuckGo has a newer version of that file.

So, for starters you should download the proper XML file. After this, you can replace the /usr/share/conkeror/search-engines/duckduckgo.xml file¹ with the newly downloaded one and you'd be done, ready to use the new auto-suggest functionality².

If, however, you don't like overwriting your package's files because they may get overwritten again in the future³ or you really don't think it's proper, you can also create a custom webjump that does the same thing, which is what I did.

In case you are following my lead, first we'd need to put the downloaded XML file somewhere. I suggest ~/.conkerorrc/search-engines because that way everything in your configuration stays nice and contained, although you might want to put it in your ~/.conkeror.mozdev.org/conkeror/CODE.PROFILE/search-engines, where CODE is an eight-character alphanumeric sequence (as far as I can tell) and PROFILE is the name of the profile you use⁴, because that should already be included in your opensearch_load_paths.

If you put the XML in your .conkerorrc you'll need to add that directory to your opensearch_load_paths, so put something like the following in your init.js, or whichever filename you use for your conkeror init:

opensearch_load_paths.push(make_file("~/.conkerorrc/search-engines"));

After Conkeror knows where to find your custom search engine specifications you can create a webjump for it:

define_opensearch_webjump("ddg", "ddg.xml");

Once you evaluate these lines or restart your Conkeror, you should have a ddg webjump with auto-suggestion. Yay!

Footnotes

1. I have Conkeror installed in /usr, so if you have it installed somewhere else your path will be different.

2. You might have to restart Conkeror first, I didn't test it without restarting.

3. This can of course happen when, for example, your package manager updates your Conkeror installation.

4. The default profile is named (appropriately) default.