How do I get Safari to search all tabs from all Safari windows in the Tab Overview, instead of only those in the current window?

Question

When I press the shiftcommand\ keyboard shortcut, it goes into 'expose' mode and allows to search thru only the tabs in the current window, not all windows.

It would be super handy to be able to search/display tabs from all windows.

Is there a way to do this?

Answer 1

This extension: http://nickvdp.com/tablist/ does allow global search and is awesome. It would also be good if it included iCloud tabs.

I would love it more if it could be invoked from the keyboard or integrated into Spotlight but it's still incredible. The way it just brings that tab+window directly to the front is beautiful.

Answer 2

The shiftcommand\ keyboard shortcut is used to toggle the Tab Overview option in Safari. This can also be accessed via the View > Show Tab Overview option via the menubar, or from the Show/Exit Tab Overview icon in the Toolbar.

As you've found, this only displays a visual thumbnail of all tabs from the current window, and not all tabs from all Safari windows.

Unfortunately, there's no modifier key you can use to enhance this shortcut, but you may find an Extension that does what you want. Extensions don't necessarily work for all versions of Safari, so you may need to experiment a bit to see if one exists that can do what you want.

You can browse for Extensions in the Safari Extensions Gallery.

Finally, you may want to submit some feedback to Apple requesting this feature. For example, you could suggest that including the option key in the shortcut (i.e. pressing optionshiftcommand\) works to display all tabs from all windows.

You can submit Safari feedback here.

Answer 3

"Tabs Switcher" from the App Store works great for me: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tabs-switcher/id1406718335?mt=12

Answer 4

Not a free solution, but there is an Alfred workflow that enables searching across all the tabs of all the windows in safari. I just tried it with Safari 13 (after RecentTabList stopped working).

To use it, you have to:

1. Download Alfred
2. Purchase the Alfred power pack, and then
3. Download/import the Search Safari And Chrome Tabs workflow.

I then modified the workflow to use control-tab as a hot key.

It's not as fast as RecentTabList was but it's way faster than searching through 4-dozen open Safari windows and doing a "search open tabs" on each one to find one of your hundred+ open tabs.

Answer 5

The most immediate way would be to Window > Merge All Windows and then do View > Show Tab Overview

Answer 6

A working solution using AppleScript, posted at https://hea-www.harvard.edu/~fine/OSX/safari-tabs.html. Copy-pasting it here for an answer to be self-contained (and just in case a source page becomes unavailable). Using it myself.

set question to display dialog ("Find Safari tab:") default answer ""
set searchpat to text returned of question

tell application "Safari"
    set winlist to every window
    set winmatchlist to {}
    set tabmatchlist to {}
    set tabnamematchlist to {}
    repeat with win in winlist
        set ok to true
        try
            set tablist to every tab of win
        on error errmsg
            --display dialog name of win as string
            set ok to false
        end try
        if ok then
            repeat with t in tablist
                if searchpat is in (name of t as string) then
                    set end of winmatchlist to win
                    set end of tabmatchlist to t
                    set end of tabnamematchlist to (id of win as string) & "." & (index of t as string) & ".  " & (name of t as string)
                    --display dialog name of t as string
                else if searchpat is in (URL of t as string) then
                    set end of winmatchlist to win
                    set end of tabmatchlist to t
                    set end of tabnamematchlist to (id of win as string) & "." & (index of t as string) & ".  " & (name of t as string)
                    --display dialog name of t as string
                end if
            end repeat
        end if
    end repeat
    if (count of tabmatchlist) = 1 then
        --display dialog "one!"
        set w to item 1 of winmatchlist
        set t to item 1 of tabmatchlist
        set current tab of w to t
        set index of w to 1
    else if (count of tabmatchlist) = 0 then
        display dialog "No matches"
    else
        set whichtab to choose from list of tabnamematchlist with prompt "The following tabs match, please select one:"
        set AppleScript's text item delimiters to "."
        if whichtab is not equal to false then
            set tmp to text items of (whichtab as string)
            set w to (item 1 of tmp) as integer
            set t to (item 2 of tmp) as integer
            set current tab of window id w to tab t of window id w
            set index of window id w to 1
        end if
    end if
end tell

To launch this script, as described in the answer to this question (below is pretty much a copy-paste from that answer for this part): How do I assign a keyboard shortcut to an AppleScript I wrote?

1. Open Automator.
2. Make a new Quick Action.
3. Make sure it receives 'no input' at all programs.
4. Select Run Apple Script and type in your code.
5. Save
6. Go to System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts. Select Services from the sidebar and find your service. Add a shortcut by double clicking (none)
7. Finally go to System Preferences > Security > Privacy > Accessibility and add Automator and the preferred app to run the shortcut.

Please note, it's important to test if your shortcut doesn't have a conflict with other Safari shortcuts. For inst. you cannot use Command+Shift+S, because Safari just opens "Save page as" on it. And in may case some other key combinations didn't work while Safari was active, but worked when some other applications were active, for inst. Command+Option+S, Command+Shift+F - when I was in Safari those shortcuts just didn't launch the script. One keys combination that worked for me in Safari is Command+Option+\

P.S. tablist (http://nickvdp.com/tablist/) was a good solution, too bad it's no longer working