Add a command palette

Vlad
Essentially, you execute a shortcut which creates a new pop-up window (similar to macOS' Spotlight or the third-party app Alfred), that allows you to execute common commands. This could be switching to a tab, opening the history panel, toggling an extension, toggling reader view, et cetera. You type in the name of what you want to do and it does it. These are easier to learn than keyboard shortcuts and there can be far more of them.

The MVP would be a shortcut that opens a text box where the user can type in the name of a command as it appears in the menu bar and Orion executes it upon pressing enter (using arrow keys or the mouse to navigate if there are multiple matches). In other words, it would function very similar to the search bar in the 'help' section of the menu bar.

Nicer yet would be if it showed the most recent and/or most used commands by default, and if it included "submenus", for example you could type in 'history', search through your browsing history, then 'activate' whichever link you wanted into a new tab using enter.

Sidenote: A similar function exists in Vivaldi called "quick commands". It supports just about anything you can do in a browser. It would be nice to see something similar in Orion!

Vlad

To add to lumitry's great answer, I'd like to suggest an alternative approach.

Vivaldi's "quick commands" are a separate feature. You open it by a hotkey, make your choice and it disappears.

One of its features is "switch to an open tab". In Chrome, this is built into omnibar:

My idea is that the best of both worlds would be - have it all available from Orion's address bar (or, shortly, OrionBar :-) ).

Right now, when I type something in OrionBar, the search scopes seem to include:

• top hits
• search engine suggestions
• bookmarks & history

By adding the following scopes, the OrionBar becomes quite powerful command palette (no separate interface required):

• open tabs (search by title & url), a suggestion would include "switch to this tab" badge;
• windows (search by name), a suggestion would include "switch to this window" badge;
• available browser commands (as with other scopes, frequently used commands become Top Hits).

Before:

After:

vladstudio This is less a 'command' per say, it is due to the autocomplete suggestions preference, if you have open tabs enabled:

I agree.

another reason:

I prefer focus mode with vertical tabs open. Why? vertical screen real estate. A command palette which allows navigating to an url or tab would make the perfect complement.

I currently use https://github.com/brookhong/Surfingkeys to do that but since the extension support is very flaky right now that's not a good solution

lazylizard42 vladstudio

Thanks for great discussion. Can you agree on what MVP of the new implementation should be like?

Orion fuzzy search for open tabs is great, much better than Safari.

One small improvement for those of us with 100s of open tabs, is "tab search mode" a feature I use all the time in Firefox: in the address bar you type % (percentage) + one space followed by search terms, and you only get results from open tabs.

Arouet How would a casual user discover this?

Well this casual user is looking for it in Orion after using tab search functionality in Chrome, Edge and Firefox so the answer might be "because they already use it". Also this would be a great feature; a complement to the tab switching preview which is also a great feature.

MrKistic Only Firefox has this? so 95% of users would not be famiiliar. Still every feature needs to be discoverable as per HIG. So how do we do it?

Hey! My 2 cents.

So, the goal is to be able to switch to an open tab by typing a part of its title or url ("fuzzy search"). As mentioned above, in Firefox you type "% query", which is impossible to discover.

Other solutions:

• in Chrome, you can start typing in the omnibar, and if your query matches an open tab, there is a suggestion with "switch to this tab" button:

• Vivaldi has much more powerful tool - Quick Commands palette, which can be used to find tabs:

I was just going to submit a suggestion to implement Command Palette before I found this post :-)

• Chrome also has Search Tabs popup, for those who did not discover switching tabs from omnibar, and you can type & switch there as well:

• Alfred has couple of nice workflows to switch tabs: Safari Assistant, Browser Tabs.

IMHO, the best option for Orion would be a Command Palette. With one hotkey and a couple of keys pressed, you could:

• find and switch to a tab (by page title or url);
• find and switch to a window (by name);
• find and open a bookmark;
• maybe even execute most common commands (although most of them have shortcuts anyway).

Once you get used to the power of Command Palette, there is no coming back!

I just found there is already a suggestion by someone else, under review, hooray!

https://orionfeedback.org/d/1831-add-a-command-palette

@vladstudio can you help summarize the ask, as it has gone out of control?

FYI both https://thebrowser.company/ https://beamapp.co/ solve this really well - the arc implementation is actually fantastic

Vlad I sure can :-) allow me to do this on weekend though - crazy weekdays at work. Thanks.

lazylizard42 What makes it fantastic? Describe

Screenshots/videos welcome

1) beautiful design (like the rest of arc, also, unrelated, love how they solved the URL for the side-tabs - preserves all vertical screen real estate)

2) expansive commandset

see here: https://browserinc.notion.site/Command-Bar-T-Actions-e18b0069b1db45a99db1fc07d9ba4c41

especially
1) managing tabs with fuzzy search
2) managing history

here you can see how with one word written I query tabs, history and start a search simultaneously. Massive reduction in cognitive load because whenever I want to do anything I just press cmd+t, then start thinking about what I want to do and start typing until only remaining what I wanted to do - this is a lot faster than having first to decide what I want to do, then click the respective shortcut (e.g. having 3 shortcuts for command, history and tabs)
3) managing extensions (e.g. to turn off ublock for a site, I just cmd+t, then type ub<cr>

and voila I can turn it off
4) split views & managing them (again additional feature worth implementing imho, though separate request)

5) preferences