[eviks]

99% of the time you use <0.1% of the bangs, so setting those up isn't a significant investment. Then there are also the downsides mentioned above (less convenient, no preview, not portable across search engines), so no, it's not a strict win, but an inferior alternative which is superior only in those cases where you can't setup something better

[hedora]

If I went that route, I’d have to set them up on my phone, tablet, laptop, desktop, etc, all of which have different operating systems/web browsers.

I guess I could implement them as a web server, and point all my devices at it.

[eviks]

Some browsers sync these settings, so that removes a lot of the complexity. But in general, you're repeating the same mistake. No, you wouldn't have to do that, you'd just set it up on the devices you use the most to get the most convenience in the most common cases, and then use the less convenient option on others.

There is no point in making 100% of your experience worse just because you can't make 100% of your experience better

[hedora]

None of the browsers I use across those devices sync settings well. Even if it was 100% firefox, I don't want to trust the cloud, and can't be bothered to set up a mozilla sync server just for this (I don't use bookmarks, and there aren't any other settings I want to sync).

Also, as it is, I make 100% of my experience better by switching all the browsers to a search engine that provides better results than google and has !bang support.

There are at least two such search engines: duck duck go and kagi.

[eviks]

To make an actual "better" argument you have to address the aforementioned limitations

[hedora]

> Then there are also the downsides mentioned above (less convenient, no preview, not portable across search engines), so no, it's not a strict win, but an inferior alternative which is superior only in those cases where you can't setup something better

- less convenient: Addressed by my comment.

- no preview: I do not want preview, so this is a bonus. It's also orthogonal, since if the search bar was configured to preview, it could also display bang results.

- not portable across search engines: It already works on all non-terrible search engines because they standardized the bangs.

[eviks]

> - less convenient: Addressed by my comment.

Not addressed, Shift+1+w is less convenient than w, try to address that by your comment!

> I do not want preview, so this is a bonus.

Not a bonus since you can achieve the same natively, so again not better

> It's also orthogonal, since if the search bar was configured to preview, it could also display bang results.

No it couldn't? What's your preview link to DDG to show the results of a Wikipedia page for a given search term in the browser?

> - not portable across search engines: It already works on all non-terrible search engines because they standardized the bangs.

Since these don't exist (DDG is very similar to Google in search quality), it doesn't work. But this is personal, so if your needs are narrow enough to be covered just by DDG+Kagi, than you obviously don't need portability.