Mobile Phones, Wikipedia, and DuckDuckGo Bangs (featuring !wm)❗
Updated  by  nm  2024-October-7

Recently I had to get a new 5G phone because my old 4G phone barely worked. On my new phone, for some unknown reason, Wikipedia was displaying “desktop view” rather than “mobile view.” After a tiny bit of debugging, I thought OK, for now I’ll deal with this by using DuckDuckGo bangs. Here’s what I did:

1. In the phone’s default web browser, I set DuckDuckGo as the search engine. (Fortunately this was one of the built-in search options.⁠😌)
2. When I want to search Wikipedia, I prepend or append !wm to the search string. This means search the mobile version of Wikipedia (en.m.wikipedia.org).

For example, to view Wikipedia’s page about DuckDuckGo, I type either of the following into my phone’s browser search box:

!wm duckduckgo
duckduckgo !wm

I’ve known about DuckDuckGo bangs for a long time but hadn’t used them much until this phone issue inspired me to memorize some of them, including these:

At the moment, there are 13,567 bangs so I have a lot more to learn!

Here is a bang example that’s relevant to Infinite Ink.

1. Go to ddg.gg (this is shorter to type than duckduckgo.com)
2. In the search box type git bash !hn or !hn git bash
3. At the moment, one of the results is a Hacker News discussion about Infinite Ink’s article titled Git Bash Is My Preferred Windows Shell.😃

Eventually I’ll set up my new phone with a better default browser, but this was a fast way to deal with one of this phone’s issues.