Unified Pickers & Keyboard-Driven Navigation Inspired by SurfingKeys

[enthusiva]

Zen Browser already offers efficient keyboard shortcuts for navigating tabs, workspaces, and history. However, managing a large number of tabs, workspaces, or profiles using sequential shortcuts can become inefficient. Inspired by the SurfingKeys extension, I propose integrating search-driven pickers and keyboard-centric navigation enhancements to improve workflow efficiency.

Why This Matters

1. Scalable & Efficient Navigation

• Cycling through tabs or workspaces one by one becomes slow as the number grows.
• Searchable pickers allow users to jump directly to what they need instead of cycling through options.

2. Unified & Intuitive Workflow

• A single search-driven approach makes navigation more consistent across tabs, workspaces, and profiles.
• Reduces the need to memorize multiple shortcuts, allowing users to search and select effortlessly.

3. Enhanced Keyboard-Driven Browsing

• Vim-style navigation and link hinting enable fully mouse-free browsing, improving speed and accessibility.
• Users can quickly open, search, copy, and interact with elements using only the keyboard.

4. Privacy & Performance Benefits

• Many users rely on extensions like SurfingKeys, which require broad permissions and impact performance.
• A native implementation keeps Zen Browser lightweight, secure, and self-contained while providing the same power-user benefits.

Proposed Features

1. Searchable pickers for tabs, workspaces, and profiles to allow instant switching.
2. Omnibar integration for unified navigation and search-driven selection.
3. Keyboard-driven link hinting and navigation for a fully mouseless experience.
4. Built-in search & copy commands to enhance efficiency.
5. Customizable keybindings to adapt to different user workflows.

Would love to hear your thoughts on this!

[AggressiveHayBale]

This or at least don't interrupt keyboard driven workflow by focusing on the buggy omnibar on the new window start.

I may sound overly negative but I really appreciate of what devs are doing here, just in my opinion omnibar in current state is kinda lacking and needs some polishing.

[MilanV]

I support this idea as much as I can. Current situation is that one needs SurfingKeys or Tridactyl etc. Not only such extensions need broad permissions - another problem is that they must run some JS to achieve so (potential security risks, performance penalty etc. - for example I have a bad experience with huge memory leaks). And the original FF hotkeys are still defined what makes collisions sometimes and so unwanted/unexpected operations, loss of work etc.
Some extensions (i.e. Tridactyl) must inject their code into every page to provide their features. That makes even another sort of problems like an additional mess in a page debugging (many unrelated CSS styles, JS code etc.).