Where has Brett Terpstra's SearchLink been all my life?

I listened to the Automators podcast with Brett Terpstra. There’s lots of automating and productivity gold in this episode but there was one thing in particular that piqued my interest.

Brett was describing a MacOS service he created that allowed you to select any markdown text, run the service on it, and it would use an internet search to fill in the links for you.

Before I publish here I like to make sure I’ve linked up as many terms as I can to their respective web pages, especially the tech and dev ones in case there are any newcomers to development that are reading my notes. To do that I have to manually search e.g. “Apollo Client”, copy the first result’s URL and paste it into my note.

Using this service I can just leave the markdown link URL section blank e.g. [Apollo Client](), and when the service is run, it fills the link with the first result from a DuckDuckGo search. You can also add a more specific search term when your link text isn’t what you want in the search e.g. [Astro](!g "Astro build").

After adding all my “empty” links to my note, when I’ve finished writing the note I can select all the text on it, run the service, and all the links will fill in. No manual searching and filling is required! Brilliant!