From The Tips Box: Bookmark Separators, Address Bar Translation

Readers offer their best tips for adding bookmark separators to Chrome, translating pages right from your address bar, and taking advantage of your shortcut muscle memory across platforms.

About the Tips Box: Every day we receive boatloads of great reader tips in our inbox, but for various reasons—maybe they’re a bit too niche, maybe we couldn’t find a good way to present it, or maybe we just couldn’t fit it in—the tip didn’t make the front page. From the Tips Box is where we round up some of our favourites for your buffet-style consumption. Got a tip of your own to share? Email it to tips at lifehacker.com.au.

Create Bookmark Separators in Chrome

Sherwood shows us a workaround for creating bookmark separators in Chrome:

When I switched from Firefox to Chrome, the one feature I missed was the ability to add bookmark separators. Couldn’t find an extension to fix it, so I made a quick hack. Head to http://separatethis.com/ and add it to your bookmarks where you need a separator.

There are some different styles available at the homepage too. It’s a clever workaround, and well executed by Sherwood for us all to use.

Translate Words from Your Address Bar with a Custom Search Engine

Jack-of-all-tips JBanbrick tells us how to translate web pages right from the address bar:

Translate directly from your browser’s address or search bar, by adding a search engine (in Chrome) or bookmark (in Firefox) which points to

translate.google.com/#auto|en|%s

The search engine above will translate from any detected language to English but you can create your own, personalised one, with whatever languages you like, by doing the following:

1. Go to Google Translate
2. Set the settings of the translation to whatever you want your translate settings to be
3. Press ‘Enter’ on your keyboard in the text input box (without entering any text)
4. Copy and paste the address of the page, into the appropriate box in Chrome’s ‘Edit search engines…’ in you browser’s settings. In Firefox, just add a new bookmark.
5. In the URL replace %0A (or the last section of the URL) with %s
6. Give it whatever keyword you want (just like custom search engines)

Now you can translate directly from your browser’s address/search bar!

Just one more awesome task you can perform from your address bar.

Remap Keyboard Shortcuts You Aren’t Used to Across OSes

Caincha shares the best way to keep your keyboard shortcuts quick and useful:

It may sound silly to most, but I was surprised to see how many people doesn’t know this: it doesn’t matter which system you’re running – Windows, OSX, Linux, Solaris, whatever – always use the same keyboard shortcuts you’re already used to (like the ones to copy/paste, undo, etc) in all the apps you have and use. You’ll be amazed to see that much of those shortcuts are universal through all your apps.

Same goes to drag-and-drop, I always surprise myself to see what I can do with that.

I do this with every OS installation I have. On Windows, this is really easy to do by remapping keys with AutoHotkey. Mac users can do the same using the built-in keyboard remapper. Photo by Mike Traboe.

Copy and Paste Bookmarks Between Browsers

Firefox Guru PrairieMoon lets us know the easiest ways to transfer bookmarks between browsers:

Just a couple of things from the land of Obvious (except to me). I noticed you can copy/cut paste bookmarks from one Firefox bookmarks toolbar to that of another version. Worked ok between FF4, Aurora and Nightlies. Right-click as ever, copy or cut, switch over to the other FF version, right-click that browser’s bookmarks toolbar (or probably in the bookmarks manager as well) and it gets pasted.

I tested this with other browsers, and sure enough it worked. You can even paste bookmarks from one browser (e.g. Firefox) into another (e.g. Chrome). Pretty handy.