Loving glide had some feedback and ideas.

[wandy-dev]

After daily driving for a bit there are a few thoughts and suggestions and I'd be curious what other people think.

Things I miss from other modal browsers

• more robust navigation tools in the command mode.
  • :tab should fall back to :tab_new if the fuzzy search returns no results. Right now if I though I had github pulled up but I didn't I and type github and see I don't have that tab so I have to back out and use :tab_new instead. Feels kind of cumbersome.
  • :tab_new (and hopefully in the future :tab should fuzzy find from browser history. nmap O to tab_new and ignore the stock firefox urlbar entirely
  • ability to use command mode to edit and navigate the current tab rather than just tab_new

perhaps :tabs and :tab_new could be replaced with :open?
:open takes a url as an arg and navigates the current tab to the url
takes flags:

• -t for new tab
• -h to include history
  No args passed defaults to the tab switcher.

UI changes

Being a modal browser, most of the UI is never used and can be removed. I found https://github.com/Dook97/firefox-qutebrowser-userchrome and made a couple changes like hiding more buttons, and preventing the autohide of the navbar. I'd just remove the navbar but that shows the current mode and key sequence. And command mode navigation isn't to a place where I can avoid the stock navbar

Very wordy way of saying: less UI bloat. And more command mode nav controls. Otherwise I'm loving glide!

[RobertCraigie]

thanks for the suggestions!

perhaps :tabs and :tab_new could be replaced with :open?

I think the things you want from :tab should be a separate command, like :open, and :tab + :tab_new should be their own thing.

I personally only really want to use :tab to navigate existing tabs, and the "open new tab if not found" functionality would be slightly annoying for me.

But TL;DR adding something like :tab_new / :open is a 👍 from me.

Being a modal browser, most of the UI is never used and can be removed. I found Dook97/firefox-qutebrowser-userchrome

oh that styling does look pretty cool. I have no short/medium term plans to provide builtin restyling, but I do agree that customising the UI should be a more "blessed" path.

maybe some sort of user-maintained directory for chrome styles, with a "click to copy a one-liner to add to your config" would be pretty nice?

[roceb]

If you make a ticket for it, I can work on it.

…

On Sat, Oct 11, 2025, 2:32 PM Robert Craigie ***@***.***> wrote: thanks for the suggestions! perhaps :tabs and :tab_new could be replaced with :open? I think the things you want from :tab should be a separate command, like :open, and :tab + :tab_new should be their own thing. I personally only really want to use :tab to navigate existing tabs, and the "open new tab if not found" functionality would be slightly annoying for me. But TL;DR adding something like :tab_new / :open is a 👍 from me. Being a modal browser, most of the UI is never used and can be removed. I found Dook97/firefox-qutebrowser-userchrome <https://github.com/Dook97/firefox-qutebrowser-userchrome> oh that styling does look pretty cool. I have no short/medium term plans to provide builtin restyling, but I do agree that customising the UI should be a more "blessed" path. maybe some sort of user-maintained directory for chrome styles, with a "click to copy a one-liner to add to your config" would be pretty nice? — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#61 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AFC4R2W3W6EVP77XUWNP2FL3XFEK5AVCNFSM6AAAAACI5TETQSVHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43URDJONRXK43TNFXW4Q3PNVWWK3TUHMYTINRVGU2TGNA> . You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[peff]

FWIW, here is the open config I've been using, which behaves like tridactyl's version in a few ways:

1. It tries the first argument as a shorthand for a configured search URL, so you can :open wiki foo to search wikipedia for "foo" (if configured as below).
2. When it's not a shorthand and it doesn't look like a real URL, we feed it to the first search shorthand. So :open foo bar will search Google for "foo bar" (again, if configured as below).

What I really miss from tridactyl is it matching the terms in the browser history and offering them as completions (that you can select from with <Tab>). Looking things up in history doesn't sound too complicated, but I'm not sure how it would interact with the commandline completion system in Glide.

Anyway, here's the config I'm using:

let search_urls: string[] = [
  ["g", "https://google.com/search?q="],
  ["map", "https://google.com/maps?q="],
  ["wiki", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search="],
];
function args_to_url(args: Array) {
  if (!args.length)
    return null;

  // A single argument with dots is a host or URL on its own. But
  // take care to complete it with a scheme if it doesn't have one.
  if (args.length == 1 && args[0].indexOf(".") >= 0) {
    if (!/^[a-z]+:/.test(args[0]))
      return "https://" + args[0];
    else
      return args[0];
  }

  // Otherwise, consider the first argument as a search
  // shorthand.
  for (const url of search_urls) {
    if (args[0] == url[0]) {
      args.shift(); // drop shorthand
      return url[1] + args.map(encodeURIComponent).join("+");
    }
  }

  // No shorthand match. Feed all args to the first (default)
  // search url.
  return search_urls[0][1] + args.map(encodeURIComponent).join("+");
}
glide.excmds.create(
        { name: "open",
          description: "Open URL in current tab",
        },
        ({ args_arr }) => {
          browser.tabs.update({ url: args_to_url(args_arr) });
        }
);
glide.keymaps.set("normal", "o", "commandline_show open ");
glide.excmds.create(
        { name: "tab_open",
          description: "Open URL in new tab",
        },
        ({ args_arr }) => {
          browser.tabs.create({ url: args_to_url(args_arr) });
        }
);
glide.keymaps.set("normal", "t", "commandline_show tab_open ");

[RobertCraigie]

this is very cool thanks for sharing!

What I really miss from tridactyl is it matching the terms in the browser history and offering them as completions (that you can select from with ). Looking things up in history doesn't sound too complicated, but I'm not sure how it would interact with the commandline completion system in Glide.

unfortunately the commandline doesn't have a blessed customisation path just yet, so it isn't really feasible to build that yourself right now.

customising the commandline is pretty high on my priority list, the main difficult is in coming up with a good API.

[RobertCraigie]

unfortunately the commandline doesn't have a blessed customisation path just yet

this is no longer true :)

in the next release you'll be able to build custom pickers like this!

glide.keymaps.set("normal", "<leader>o", async () => {
  const bookmarks = await browser.bookmarks.getRecent(10);

  glide.commandline.show({
    title: "bookmarks",
    options: bookmarks.map((bookmark) => ({
      label: bookmark.title,
      render() {
        return DOM.create_element("div", {
          style: { display: "flex", alignItems: "center", gap: "8px", marginLeft: "1em" },
          children: [
            DOM.create_element("img", {
              src: `page-icon:${bookmark.url}`,
              style: { width: "16px", height: "16px" },
            }),
            bookmark.title,
          ],
        });
      },
      async execute() {
        const tab = await glide.tabs.get_first({ url: bookmark.url });
        if (tab) {
          await browser.tabs.update(tab.id, { active: true });
        } else {
          await browser.tabs.create({ active: true, url: bookmark.url });
        }
      },
    })),
  });
}, { description: "Open the bookmarks picker" });