Nicknamed search engines for Vivaldi features (browser history, open tabs, etc)
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Currently, you can search a lot of different things with Quick Commands - open tabs, browser history, browser commands, recently closed tabs, and so on. However, as far as I know, there is no way to easily narrow a quick commands search (or an address bar search, for that matter) to specifically limit results to only one of these categories. This leads to some problems:
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Clutter. For example, when you try to search for an open tab, you might have to first scroll past a dozen unwanted results from browser history, commands, and other categories. Additionally, part of the reason a lot of these categories are not searchable from the address bar might be that they would clog up the dropdown with far too many results. (I admit this last sentence is speculation on my part, but I think this difficulty is at least a valid one.)
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Sluggishness. If you have a lot of bookmarks, or if you like to keep your history around for a long time for whatever reason, Quick Commands can get pretty slow - especially with results displaying as you type. I have experienced this firsthand, and I don't know how much it can be/is already optimized, so improvement might be possible through that avenue for all I know. However, being able to instantly choose what category to search would definitely eliminate this problem when you are not trying to search these more sluggish categories.
An organic way to fix these issues would be to allow different categories of results to be searched with customizable nicknames, just like any other search engine. For example, I might configure "t some-tab" to search through my open tabs and omit all other results, or "h some-history-search-terms" to search exclusively within my browser history. I can think of the following advantages, aside from fixing the problems above:
- Address bar possibilities. Currently, some categories are exclusive to Quick Commands only. For example, there is no way to search for open tabs from the address bar. However, if such categories are available just like any other search engine, this raises the opportunity to access them from the address bar and not just Quick Commands. It might be preferred by some users.
- Additional categories. There is the possibility of adding the ability to search the Vivaldi settings, saved sessions, notes, downloads, extensions, and other categories that are not currently accessible from Quick Commands (or the address bar for that matter).
- Unification. Currently it is possible to exclusively search some categories by using the history and bookmarks managers, or the panels in the side bar. However, these are separate from the Quick Commands interface, and require either mouse clicks to open them, or keyboard shortcuts such as Ctrl+H and Ctrl+B. Not all of them allow you to begin searching immediately; sometimes you have to click the search field in order to start typing. Thus, the searching workflows feel different and (depending on your opinion) disruptive or awkward. Allowing each specific category to have an exclusive search available through a search-engine-style nickname would unify all the searches into one interface, streamlining every search.
I do suspect this feature could take substantial work, but in my opinion it might be quite worth it. What do we think?
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This is needed for all search fields, but especially quick commands. A nickname websearch should use the search engine and then we need to be able to set search nicknames for all other search types, like commands, closed tabs, open tabs, history, bookmarks, pages actions, mail and notes.