searching.md

Keyboard Shortcuts

Searching

One of the primary purposes of Dashy is to allow you to quickly find and launch a given app. To make this as quick as possible, there is no need to touch the mouse, or press a certain key to begin searching - just start typing. Results will be filtered in real-time. No need to worry about case, special characters or small typos, these are taken care of, and your results should appear.

Navigating

You can navigate through your items or search results using the keyboard. You can use Tab to cycle through results, and Shift + Tab to go backwards. Or use the arrow keys, ↑, →, ↓ and ←.

Launching Apps

You can launch a elected app by hitting Enter. This will open the app using your default opening method, specified in target (either newtab, sametab, modal, top or workspace). You can also use Alt + Enter to open the app in a pop-up modal, or Ctrl + Enter to open it in a new tab. For all available opening methods, just right-click on an item, to bring up the context menu.

Tags

By default, items are filtered by the title attribute, as well as the hostname (extracted from url), the provider and description. If you need to find results based on text which isn't included in these attributes, then you can add tags to a given item.

  items:
  - title: Plex
    description: Media library
    icon: favicon
    url: https://plex.lab.local
    tags: [ movies, videos, music ]
  - title: FreshRSS
    description: RSS Reader
    icon: favicon
    url: https://freshrss.lab.local
    tags: [ news, updates, blogs ]

In the above example, Plex will be visible when searching for 'movies', and FreshRSS with 'news'

Custom Hotkeys

For apps that you use regularly, you can set a custom keybinding. Use the hotkey parameter on a certain item to specify a numeric key, between 0 - 9. You can then launch that app, by just pressing that key, which is much quicker than searching for it, if it's an app you use frequently.

- title: Bookstack
  icon: far fa-books
  url: https://bookstack.lab.local/
  hotkey: 2
- title: Git Tea
  icon: fab fa-git
  url: https://git.lab.local/
  target: workspace
  hotkey: 3

In the above example, pressing 2 will launch Bookstack. Or hitting 3 will open Git in the workspace view.

Web Search

It's possible to search the web directly from Dashy, which might be useful if you're using Dashy as your start page. This can be done by typing your query as normal, and then pressing ⏎. Web search options are configured under appConfig.webSearch.

Setting Search Engine

Set your default search engine using the webSearch.searchEngine property. This defaults to DuckDuckGo. Search engine must be referenced by their key, the following providers are supported:

• duckduckgo, google, whoogle, qwant, startpage, searx-bar, searx-info
• searx-tiekoetter, searx-bissisoft, ecosia, metager, swisscows, mojeek
• wikipedia, wolframalpha, stackoverflow, github, reddit, youtube, bbc

Using Custom Search Engine

You can also use a custom search engine, that isn't included in the above list (like a self-hosted instance of Whoogle or Searx). Set searchEngine: custom, and then specify the URL (plus query params) to you're search engine under customSearchEngine.

For example:

appConfig:
  webSearch:
    searchEngine: custom
    customSearchEngine: 'https://searx.local/search?q='

Setting Opening Method

In a similar way to opening apps, you can specify where you would like search results to be opened. This is done under the openingMethod attribute, and can be set to either newtab, sametab or workspace. By default results are opened in a new tab.

Using Bangs

An insanely useful feature of DDG is Bangs, where you type a specific character combination at the start of your search query, and it will be redirected the that website, such as '!w Docker' will display the Docker wikipedia page. Dashy has a similar feature, enabling you to define your own custom bangs to redirect search results to a specific app, website or search engine.

This is done under the searchBangs property, with a list of key value pairs. The key is what you will type, and the value is the destination, either as an identifier or a URL with query parameters.

For example:

appConfig:
  webSearch:
    searchEngine: 'duckduckgo'
    openingMethod: 'newtab'
    searchBangs:
      /r: reddit
      /w: wikipedia
      /s: https://whoogle.local/search?q=
      /a: https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=
      ':wolf': wolframalpha
      ':so': stackoverflow
      ':git': github

Note that bangs begging with ! or : must be surrounded them in quotes

Disabling Web Search

Web search can be disabled, by setting disableWebSearch, for example:

appConfig:
  webSearch: { disableWebSearch: true }

Clearing Search

You can clear your search term at any time, resting the UI to it's initial state, by pressing Esc. This can also be used to close any open pop-up modals.