Whats different from v1.4 ?
There is now a search field incorporated in the result box. There is also tabs, so you can go directly to another search engine. There have been a major cleanup, and a lot of features in 1.4 has been removed (I figured these features obsolete, now that we have the tabs). Also, you should know that you can open the searchbox by clicking SHIFT+CTRL+SPACE

In order to get beautiful search results on the build-in sites, you should also install the LookItUp2 userstyle (This requires the Stylish plugin).



Note: Don't forget to disable the v1.4 script (if you have it installed)

Quick Tour

1. Install the script.
2. Try it out, by clicking SHIFT+CTRL+SPACE
3. The search box will open
4. Enter some text in the search field (Tip: If you select some text before clicking SHIFT+CTRL+SPACE, then the search field will be display this text).
5. Click on the "w" button (also called tab), in order to look it up in Wikipedia
6. Click the ">" button to look it up in the next tab (Which is Wictionary)
7. As default, the system preloads the next tab, so the Wictionary search result should display quickly. Now, while you read the Wictionary results, the next tab (Chambers) is preloading in the background.
8. Click on the page, or press Esc key to close the box
9. Select some text, and press "w".
10. Wikipedia will open in the right side of the page. All sites have shortcuts, so you can go quickly to a specific search engine.
11. While the text is still highlighted, press "i", and a google image search will show up
12. Customize the script by pressing '#' while some text is hightlighted. You can disable the preload feature by changing "cache ahead" to "0", and clicking "Save". I recommend keeping the value low. I think "1" is the best setting, but "2" may be good for you.


Its easy to add sites. Make a search for on your favourite search engine. Copy the url, but replace your word with the string: [words]. You can read more about adding sites on the v1.4 page

Note: Its possible to add cleanup instructions in the url, in order to get beautiful search results (css, xpath selecting, regexp and more). Its all documented on the CleanItUp page (note: use "lookitup" in the url instead of "cleanitup")

Note: This version is still kind of beta. There is probably a bug or two. Please let me know if you see one.
Note: This script does not work in IE7Pro. Fortunately, someone has made a version of LookItUp that works in IE7Pro. Its available here: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/8439

About Modes

Modes where added in v0.3.3. The motivation was this: I found that some texts are very hard, and requires a lot of lookups in the same dictionary. I would like it to be quicker to make subsequent lookups. So I came up with the idea of a new mode: Selecting new text immediately looks it up in the open tab, when the search box is open. This implies that the box no longer can be closed, by simply clicking next to it (it can still be closed by pressing Esc). I call this feature "select", by the lack of a better name. Maybe "Stay open" would be a better name, but that doesn't capture the purpose. Anyway, not much joy with a box that stays open, if it overlaps the text. So I also added a "inline" feature. With this activated, the document is resized, so the box appears to be inline. I actually just set the "padding" style of the body. With these two features, I got what I wanted - but I didn't want it all the time. I would like to be able to activate it when I discovered that a text was especially hard. So, I made a "mode" button in the upper-right corner, that changes mode. It starts in mode 0, which is the good old way. I click on it to enter mode 1, which is my "hard text" mode. These are the two modes that the script is born with. But I figured that you guys probably has other needs, so I made it possible to customize the modes. You could ie define mode #1 to be a wider box, or maybe you like the "select" feature, but don't like the "inline" feature. I personally decided that I like the new behaviours better that the old, so I switched the modes. Regarding inline: As the document changes width, there was a high risk that the selected text would no longer be visible. Therefore, I implemented a "scrollSelectedTextIntoView" feature. This is called when switching into "inline" mode, and when switching away from it

About join

Join allows you to have several sites in the same tab. Here is an example of how it looks if you join Chambers and google images, and search for "banana":



Here is how to define a join of Wikipedia and Chambers: Press "New site". In "name", write whatever you want. In "url" enter "join:wc". Choose whatever key you like. When you look at this tab, you will now see both Wikipedia and Chambers results. They share the tab. Wikipedia takes up the upper half, Chambers takes up the lower part. Ok, want three sites in same tab? no problem. Just write "join:wci". This will also show google images results. The price is ofcourse that there are now only 33% space for each. The examples above only works as described, if you have Wikipedia on key 'w', Chambers on key 'c' and google images on key 'i'. So, you can only join sites that you have already defined. This feature is still a bit experimental, so the syntax may change in the future. The story behind this feature is that I found myself constantly in need of two dictionaries. The english-danish for a quick explanation, and Chambers for a more elaborate definition. Instead of only seeing one dictionary at the time, I wanted to see both simultaniously. None of those dictionary results usually takes a lot of screen, so there would be plenty of screen for both of them. Together with the new "select" feature (see "About Modes"), its now very quick for me to read hard english texts. I just select the word, and I see the result of two dictionaries at the same time. Chances are good that one of them have a satisfactory explanation for me.

About encoding

When you make an ordernary search on a specific site, the query is encoded. Exactly how its encoded depends on the site. The site can in principle use its own obscure encoding (with javascript), but it seldom does. Usually the query is the result of an ordernary form submit. Unfortunately, the query is encoded differently, depending on the encoding (charset) of the page that contains the form. Some sites accepts both encodings (ie google), but some sites only accepts one. Chambers only accepts the encoding that stems from submitting a form from a iso-8859-1 page. Answers.com on the other hand only accepts the encoding generated by an utf-8 page. When you add a new site, you have to decide which encoding to use. Here is how to quickly determine it: Search for "ål" (a danish word for eel). If the "å" is converted to "%E5", choose "ISO-8859-1". If its converted to "%C3%A5", choose "UTF-8". If its converted to "%25C3%25A5", choose "both" (this is rarely the case, but http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org/trans... actually encodes it like this). I'm not sure if these three options cover all needs. I'm uncertain if it works on "exotic" charsets like asian or russian. Please enlighten me, if you can.

About "merge into sites"

This feature was added, so you easily can get the correct encodings for the sites that you have, that is also listed in "Add sites". If you click this button, each site that you have is examined. If there exists a site in the "Add sites" list that has the same name as your site, your site url and encoding will be updated. Press this button regularily in order to take advantage of url updates. Note: You run the risk that you have added a site that coincidentially has the same name as one in the "Add sites" list. If this happens, your url will be overridden, and the moment you press "save" will be the moment you loose it.

Version history

14 APR 2008 - v0.5.91

• Added "changetarget" in cleanup-part

14 APR 2008 - v0.5.9

• Fixed Ctrl+Shift+Space in FF3
• Fixed autoupdate. It was supposed to never run in frames, but unfortunately it was only running in frames. dough
• wikipedia and wictionary urls have been changed so links are now underlined

12 APR 2008 - v0.5.8

• Implemented fix by Billy Blue (for FireFox 3 Beta 5)
• Fixed settings as pointed out by Alvin (for FireFox 3 Beta 5)

02 JUL 2007 - v0.5.7

• Fixed minor bug concerning deleting a mode

02 JUL 2007 - v0.5.6

• Fixed bug: "comma"

02 JUL 2007 - v0.5.5

• Fixed bug: in v0.5.4, the default sites all searched for "comma" (this bug only affected users that never pressed "Save" in settings)

01 JUL 2007 - v0.5.4

• Added encoding option to sites (See "About encoding")
• Added "merge into sites" on "Add sites" (See "about merge into sites")

28 JUN 2007 - v0.5.2

• Added setting: "Switch to site mode, when key shortcut"
• Added setting: "Switch to site mode, when tab is clicked"

28 JUN 2007 - v0.5.1

• Default modes can now be assigned to each site

25 JUN 2007 - v0.5

• Fixed false triggers problem
• Now only scrolls, when text is selected (in "inline" mode)

24 JUN 2007 - v0.4.1

• Google reader is now excluded

24 JUN 2007 - v0.4

• Fixed autoupdate. userscripts.org unfortunately changed the script source url, which my autoupdate relied on. I changed the url, so its loaded from my own server instead.

19 JUN 2007 - v0.3.7

• Fixed "splice", renamed it to "join" and added an example to default sites

17 JUN 2007 - v0.3.6

• Added "splice" functionality

17 JUN 2007 - v0.3.4

• Woops there was a very critical bug in v0.3.3, which made it impossible to save settings

17 JUN 2007 - v0.3.3

• Added modes (see "About modes" above)
• Added 'inline', 'select' and 'side' settings
• Now excludes entire gmail (@exclude http*://mail.google.com/*)
• Autoupdate does not run in frames anymore
• Pressing CTRL+SHIFT+SPACE the first time now opens up the first url
• A warning is issued, if user tries to assign 'q', '#' or '?' as a key

11 JUN 2007 - v0.3.2

• Selecting a site in the combobox triggers a load
• The cleanup script now only performs on frames/iframes. The idea behind this is the following: If you have BreakOut installed, you can ctrl+doubleclick on the result page to open it in a new tab. I figure that its better that the result is not stripped, when viewed on a new tab.
• Added "redir" feature. Like the cleanup features, its a compact syntax that goes into the url. The purpose of this feature is to hijack certain links, so clicking on them gets you to a page with a similar url to the page you are on.
• Changed wikipedia and urban dict urls, so they now uses the "redir" feature. So when you click on an internal link in the result pages, the new page will also be cleaned up

08 JUN 2007 - v0.3.1

• Clicking "Search" now forces reload.
• The site cache is now cleared, when saving settings

05 JUN 2007 - v0.3 Fixed the two bugs mentioned in the comments, and added "Add site" panel in settings (loads a list of known urls from my server)
04 JUN 2007 - v0.2 Fixed bug: The cache-ahead could under some circumstances run loose, and cache all sites
02 JUN 2007 - v0.1 Created from v1.4

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