Getting started

What is the Single Dispatch command palette?

Single Dispatch is a chrome extension that adds a command palette to any website you visit. You can switch tabs, open bookmarks, click on buttons, or open any links on the page with just a few keystrokes. No need to touch the mouse!

Installation

To get started, head over to the chrome web store and click on Add to Chrome. Then head over to chrome://extensions/shortcuts and add a keyboard shortcut to launch the Single Dispatch command palette. I recommend cmd + K on Mac or ctrl + K on Windows.

Search for available commands

Once the chrome extension is installed, open any web page you want to work on or refresh an already open page to make sure the newly installed extension is detected. Then simply hit the keyboard shortcut selected in the previous step (e.g. cmd + K) to open the command palette. Now you can start typing to search through all available commands.

The command palette uses fuzzy search so you don’t need to spell out a command exactly or accurately. Typos are perfectly fine! You can even type in the first letter of each word, and skip words as needed. There is no need to add any spaces either.

Types of commands

Commands are grouped into several categories - Page, Tabs, Bookmarks, and Frequently Visited. While typing into the command palette, you can press Tab at any time to cycle through these categories.

Under Page, all commands derived from the current page are listed. These are links, buttons, or input elements present on the page. As well as commands for going back or forward in history or reloading the page.

The Tabs category lists all open tabs across all windows so you can quickly switch to another tab by searching for it instead of having to locate the tab visually. This is a great feature for those of us who like to have dozens of tabs open at any given time. For more details, see

Managing tabs with a command palette.

Bookmarks and Frequently Visited list all available bookmarks and your frequently visited sites as determined by your chrome history.

Premium users are able to turn off or on any of these features so they can customize the command palette to suit their needs.

Running commands

Once you see the command you want, you can use the ↑ or ↓ keys to highlight the command you want and press Enter.

For some commands such as opening a link, you will also see additional options like ctrl+alt+1 | Open in New Tab. These options allow you to run related commands with a keyboard shortcut specified by the option. For example, in the case of links, you can press ctrl+alt+1 to open the link in a new tab.

That’s all for now. I will be adding more posts as I continue to add more features. If you have any ideas for how you’d like to use Single Dispatch, let me know below!