Add a command palette

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.

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

For the people who voted, what exactly are you looking for in the command palette?

I would probably use the command palette as the main way how to interact with Orion, i.e.:

Want to open a new website?
Command Pallete -> Type in the website address

Want to search something in configured search engine?
Command Pallete -> Type in the thing I want to search for

Want to share the current website to someone?
Command Pallete -> Type in "Share" and select "Share" action

Something like this, where the "bookmark" is the keyword I'd type in as an example:

So probably:

1. Open website if the command is a website
2. Search in the search engine as the default action
3. (maybe?) search in open tabs
4. search in all the actions that Orion provides, e.g. Adding bookmarks, sharing a website, enabling reader mode, enabling compatibility mode, etc.

so: act as an address bar replacement and run common actions (that are often in the menu bar)

davidkaya What is the main difference to how address bar autocomplete behaves and why not make those changes in the address bar?

eirk correct.

Vlad actually making those changes in the address bar would be perfectly fine, the only thing it would need is a shortcut so it is not necessery to click on it.

davidkaya
there is a shortcut: cmd-L

eirk Oh, nice. Actually I looked for it recently and I couldn't find it in the menus, for some reason I did not expect that "Open Location..." would do what it does. Thanks!