[Crinus]

I had a similar case... i want to be able to download interesting videos with youtube-dl in case they or me go offline but i found having to copy the url, open a command line, move the proper folder, etc, type youtube-dl and paste the url be a bit cumbersome, so i wrote a Firefox extension to do all that for me.

This is extremely specific (and i had to switch to Firefox Developer Edition to do that since the mainline one doesn't allow unsigned extensions) but it was helpful and i got to learn how to make extensions for personal use (though the whole process to call an external program was a convoluted PITA involving adding registry entries, writing Python scripts to parse JSON, etc... meh).

[Adverblessly]

For a similar usecase I settled on writing a bash script along the lines of

  PARAM=`xclip -o -selection clipboard`
  notify-send downloading $PARAM
  youtube-dl $PARAM

And setting a keyboard shortcut to invoke it, so downloading is just

  CTRL+L (select URL)
  CTRL+C (copy selection)
  CTRL+ALT+D (trigger download script)

[jeegsy]

Damn Son! I have had the same issue and your solution is so face palm simple! Excellent.

[Ididntdothis]

This is actually not even that specific. I did the same thing a few years ago and I bet a lot of other people could use it. One lesson I learned was that writing browser extensions is quite cumbersome if you want to do something that's a little outside the normal use case.

[rasz]

I use tempermonkey for simple stuff like this, takes 2-5 minutes to write something without deploying full extension.