Safari questions (previously “Keyword search shortcuts”)

[Qaanol]

I’ve been using Chrome, but I keep hearing how much faster Safari is so I decided to try it out.

One feature of Chrome that I use *a lot* is custom search shortcuts. When I type “w <something>” it goes straight to the Wikipedia page. When I type “d <something>” it goes straight to the Dictionary.com page. I have around a dozen of these, they are super convenient, and I consider it a make-or-break feature.

In Safari I don’t see a built-in way to do this. However, I found three extensions that offer the capability: Safari Keyword Search, Safari Omnikey, and KeySearch. I’m just wondering if anyone here has experience with these, and if so which one do you recommend?

 

[Qaanol]

No input? I’ve added KeySearch and it seems to do the job well enough.

However, now I’ve found something rather annoying in Safari and I’m looking for a solution. On certain websites I always visit a specific page, eg. www.<something>.com/directory/subdir/index.html, but Safari only autocompletes the base domain, eg. www.<something>.com, and I have to hit the down arrow to select the page I want—the only page I ever visit on the site—from the list of options.

If this happened once, it wouldn’t be a big deal. But Safari doesn’t “learn” when I always select the second option from the list, so it keeps happening every single time. These are websites I visit daily, and there are several of them, so it’s rather grating.

Is there a way to remove a page from the URL autocomplete, or to reorder the options? I’ve already made sure that the base domain is not in my history nor bookmarks, but of course the full URL to the page I visit is in my history as it should be. In Chrome I could highlight an autocomplete suggestion and hit fn-shift-delete to remove it, but I don’t see a way to do that in Safari.

Also, I’m pretty sure that in Chrome the autocomplete options would automatically sort themselves based on how frequently I visit each particular page, which they do not seem to do in Safari. The upshot is, in Chrome I could type a single letter and it would autocomplete the entire URL to the specific page I visit, whereas in Safari it only autocompletes the base domain. Is there a workaround?

 

[jack1011]

No input? I’ve added KeySearch and it seems to do the job well enough.

However, now I’ve found something rather annoying in Safari and I’m looking for a solution. On certain websites I always visit a specific page, eg. www.<something>.com/directory/subdir/index.html, but Safari only autocompletes the base domain, eg. www.<something>.com, and I have to hit the down arrow to select the page I want—the only page I ever visit on the site—from the list of options.

If this happened once, it wouldn’t be a big deal. But Safari doesn’t “learn” when I always select the second option from the list, so it keeps happening every single time. These are websites I visit daily, and there are several of them, so it’s rather grating.

Is there a way to remove a page from the URL autocomplete, or to reorder the options? I’ve already made sure that the base domain is not in my history nor bookmarks, but of course the full URL to the page I visit is in my history as it should be. In Chrome I could highlight an autocomplete suggestion and hit fn-shift-delete to remove it, but I don’t see a way to do that in Safari.

Also, I’m pretty sure that in Chrome the autocomplete options would automatically sort themselves based on how frequently I visit each particular page, which they do not seem to do in Safari. The upshot is, in Chrome I could type a single letter and it would autocomplete the entire URL to the specific page I visit, whereas in Safari it only autocompletes the base domain. Is there a workaround?

I use OmniKey, and I think it can do what you want. You just go to the specific page, and then add it to OmniKey clicking the icon and then entering the shortcut you'd like to use.

 

[Qaanol]

I use OmniKey, and I think it can do what you want. You just go to the specific page, and then add it to OmniKey clicking the icon and then entering the shortcut you'd like to use.

That does sound easier than manually copying and pasting the URLs like I’ve been doing with KeySearch, thanks.

* * *

And now I’ve noticed another annoyance in Safari: although there is a “Reopen Last Closed Window” option, I do not see anything similar for “Last Closed Tab”. Since I use multiple tabs in each window, I really miss Chrome’s “Recently Closed” section that lists all the tabs and windows I’ve recently closed.

Also I don’t like how pinching to zoom out takes me away from my webpage and shows all the open tabs in miniature. Perhaps someday I might want to view those miniature tabs, but I definitely do not want it to keep happening accidentally when I’m just trying to adjust the zoom level of the current tab.

I’m trying to give Safari a fair shake, but the more of these little things I notice, the more inclined I am to go back to Chrome.