Bugzilla quicksearch, or else!

Here is a fabulous tip if you are messing around in bugzilla.mozilla.org and are searching for bugs. As, by now, as a reader of my blog, you should be.

You can search Bugzilla right from the location bar. I cannot quite bring myself to say “Awesome bar” as people do at Mozilla because I’ve said “location bar” for many years, and it feels silly.

First you will need to be logged in to a Bugzilla account!

Right(command)-click in the Search box. Choose “Add a keyword for this Search”.

Pick something short that you will remember, like “b” or “bug”. I added both since they both seem intuitive enough to me that I’ll probably forget choosing one or the other.

Command-L is the keystroke on a Mac to move to the location bar.

So, type Command-L, type bug 831552 and you will be whooshed directly to that bug.

Command-L, bug retina will result in a fairly quick list of around 18 bugs (as of right now.)

Here are a bunch of quicksearch tips for bugzilla.mozilla.org!

Take a look at the tips and see what quicksearch looks at by default. There is lots of useful info there and it is worth going through and trying some of the options and noting which field names might be specially useful.

The Advanced Shortcuts are the best thing about quicksearch for me so far. For example, Command-L, bug UNCO retina returns all the unconfirmed bugs with the keyword “retina”. (About 4, currently). Though keywords aren’t case-sensitive, the Advanced shortcut “Status” search terms are. So you have to type bug UNCO retina, not bug unco retina.

At the moment, quicksearch look in comments and various other bug metadata. After January 24th that will change — comments will be excluded by default from quicksearch. That should make it actually quicksearch instead of kinda_slow_search. Or at least quickersearch. Until then, you can type bug --comments retina and your search about retina-related bugs will be a bit faster.

Here is the “or else” part from the title of this post: If you have been calling yourself “The Bugmaster for Mozilla” for several weeks, and you slowly mouse over to a search box to type something, and you do this in front of some kick ass developer, instead of using quicksearch in the location bar, you will be embarrassed. So take it from me and don’t do that.

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