Summary
Using bangs in my browser makes me feel a bit more productive when searching for stuff, but most other solutions kind of suck, that's why I released unbang which solves most of my gripes with bangs.
TL:DR;
Unbang is a duckduckgo/unduck clone for searching through bangs,
It supports
Bangs (using !gh in your search bar to instantly search inside github)
Fully client sided interactions, no server requests
Search for your favorite bangs, or add your own ones.
Set your own fallback, we support any bang (so you can set twitter/X as your default search engine) and even custom bangs
You can check it out here π https://unbang.vercel.app
Github & Deployment
If you just want to use it you can navigate to the website and add the URL to your browser's search engines
π https://unbang.vercel.app
If you don't want to use my hosted version or make edits, it's available on github at
π https://github.com/nietthijmen/unbang
What's different from alternatives
There are 2 primary alternatives to unbang which have been released way before
DuckDuckGo's bangs:
DuckDuckGo is the original search engine to make bangs a big part of the daily workflow of many tech savvy people, they integrated it directly into their search engine, making it super quick and easy to use, but there's 1 big downside, They do it server side, which makes it pretty slow at some points.
Unbang is a fully client side alternative, built using svelte and web workers to makes the usage feel snappier.
Unduck:
Unduck was the original creator of the client side bang experience, it's a rather small project (around 35 commits).
It's a rather simple project, it only handles the redirects, no search, no custom bangs, and worst of all, a light page on redirect.
I used to use unduck for a 4 months, it's a great project, and I heavily recommend checking it out, they were the inspiration behind this entire project.
The main difference between unduck and unbang is the feature set, unbang is built using svelte instead of plain Typescript + Vite, which makes the bundle size bigger, but allows us to implement the following:
Search for bangs
Create your own custom bangs (allowing you to greatly improve browsing speed, according to myself)
A dark mode during redirects (I did blind myself at night, more than I'd like to admit)
Set your own default fallback (Unduck only supported google, Unbang supports all bang's and even custom bangs)
Screenshots
Landing screen
Some of my custom bangs
