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Searching Eclipse Newsgroups With Firefox
For the Firefox users out there, here's a tip that greatly eases the effort involved in searching Eclipse's many newsgroups.
Step 1. Create a new bookmark
1. Go to "Bookmarks | Manage Bookmarks..."
2. Click "New Bookmark..."
3. Enter in whatever name you'd like. I used "Search EMF Newsgroup"
4. Enter the following (or similar) for the location. Ensure there is no whitespace (spaces, newlines, etc.) in it.
5. Enter a keyword that is short and meaningful. I used "emf"
6. When you are all done, you should have something that looks like this.
7. Click "OK" and organize your new bookmark however suits you.
Step 2. Use your new bookmark and search the Eclipse newsgroup archive
1. Go to the address bar either by clicking there or typing CTRL-L, or use whatever means you normally do to type in an address (like CTRL-T to open a new tab).
2. Enter your keyword followed by your desired search term. For example if I want to search for Java Annotation, I'd type in emf Java Annotation. That is, my keyword (emf) followed by my desired search terms. Looks something like this.
3. When you hit enter, you should be taken to the normal Eclipse search site and find the many results to your search query.
How does it work?
Firefox replaces %s in any bookmarked url with whatever terms follow it.
So, a bookmark to https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=%s, stored as keyword bug, can open any Eclipse bugzilla by number by entering, for example, bug 116912 in Firefox's location bar.
Similarly, you can open Ant manual pages using http://ant.apache.org/manual/CoreTasks/%s.html as keyword ant, then ant xmlproperty.