Cool TextPad 5 trick: Google Search with Firefox

I was poking around the TextPad forums again, home of my favorite code editor, and ran across a tip on setting up a custom tool for executing a Google phrase search from within TextPad which launches IE. I played around and got it working with Firefox 3 (RC) and it works great.

The steps are:

1. Click on the "Configure" menu
2. Click "Preferences"
3. Click on "Tools" in the feature tree. Then click the "Add" button and select "Program"
4. Browse to select "firefox.exe" (usually under C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox)
5. Click "Apply" then click twice on the new "Firefox" entry (slowly) to enter Rename mode
6. Rename the tool to something like "Firefox Google"
7. In the feature tree, under Tools, select the new tool entry to display the details in the main panel.
8. Replace the "parameters" entry with "http://www.google.com/search?q=$SEL"
9. Save and close the Configuration dialog form.
10. Now you can highlight text in the editor and run a direct Google search on it with Firefox.

You can also make a toolbar button to this tool to make it even quicker to access.