May 09
Lifehack: Accessing Safari/WebKit tabs via a key stroke
Tech, Web Browsing with tags: firefox, hack, safari
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I love how Firefox lets me hit Apple (or Splat as James Strachan calls it!) plus a number to go to the given tab in the browser window.
I often follow the pattern of “open new link in a tab and go to it at the end” and also have windows open with known apps up in the same tab location so I can get to them quickly, without even thinking. Being able to Splat-9 to go to the end is key to this of course.
Although Firefox does this by default, WebKit/Safari does not, so I changed it via a simple hack that others have mentioned. Some people saw me doing this at JavaOne and asked me how I did it, so I decided to quickly show how it is done in the window below.
The steps to follow are:
- Generate AppleScripts to tell Safari and WebKit to go to the right tab. This is talked about here, and I have a slightly modified version that I will paste at the end of this post
- Tie together the AppleScript to the browsers. I tried to use simple keyboard bindings in the keyboard pref panel, but that didn’t work, so I ended up using Quicksilver triggers
See how it all fits together below!
January 14th, 2009 at 5:31 am
Is there a solution without Quicksilver? Since Quicksilver was quite broken when Leopard came out I switched to LaunchBar which doesn’t support key triggers.
January 28th, 2009 at 9:30 pm
@ebi
QuickSilver is working fine for me on Leopard. Perhaps something you installed like a plugin or application was messing with your QS.
February 6th, 2009 at 1:08 am
Hi, thanks for the great video, I’ll follow these guide now.