Users who love minimalist Firefox setups will be pleased to add SearchWords to their extension list. It will allow to remove the search bar from the toolbar and perform searches directly from the location just by prefixing the search terms with a defined keyword.

It adds a new button and field to the Manage Search Engine List dialog where you can define a keyword (a single or few letters make the most sense) for each search engine.

Then, you can hide the search bar and go to the location bar where you just need to enter the defined keyword followed by the search terms. For example I defined w as the keyword for Wikipedia. So I enter w thunderbird extension to look for these terms, as shown:

Note that the use of keywords has been present in Firefox (and the Mozilla Suite before that) for years, but SearchWords make it much easier to define them.