Onboarding
Contents
First use
Login
When you first launch Control Space, you'll need to log in:
- As an Early Access user, click "Forgot your password" to be emailed a link to create a new password
- Once you've done that, log in as normal
Setup
Control Space will run you through a short setup routine before you can use it:
- First, keyboard shortcut. This should be configured, but if it's not, follow the prompts
- Next, where Control Space saves tabs when you save them. You can pick a custom folder, but let's go with the default
- Finally, how many levels of folders – which will be 2 or 3 – to show in Saved Tabs.
Don't worry about this too much for now – it's probably going to change in a future version of Control Space – so choose folders, and I'll show you workspaces in a few minutes.
Click finish, and we're done!
Tour
- When control space first loads, you'll get the option to view a tour – this illustrates the main navigational features
- You can also check out the preview video I released back in October – this demos the more recent organisational features (you'll find the link in the video description)
But for now...
User interface
Workspace
Let's get familiar with the main layout:
- Your browser windows are represented by columns of tab items
- The active window has a shadow
- Active tabs (that is the current tab in each window) are darker
- The greyed-out tabs you see are unloaded or have been put to sleep
Note that Control Space is a live 1:1 representation of your browsing session:
- If you navigate in the browser, Control Space updates
- If you close a tab in Control Space, the browser tab is closed
- If you make a new window, in shows in both places
- Etc, etc...
Side panels
Control Space's side panels allow access to Recent, History, Saved and Tools
The side panels are designed to stay out of your way – which can be a bit confusing the first time you use them!
To show the side panels, you can:
- Move your mouse over and out to show and hide
- Either on the icon, or the panel content itself
- You can click to navigate and the panel will close
To keep the panel open, you can
- Type to filter (hit Esc to cancel)
- click the lock icon
- double-click panel titles
- Or click the panel icon directly
To change panels:
- click the panel titles
- Use Cmd + 1 / 2 / 3
- Or Cmd + Left / Right
Navigation
Showing and hiding
To toggle Control Space window:
- Hit Ctrl+Space
- Or Esc to hide
Control Space is effectively hidden by going behind the last-focused window:
- Because of this, toggling works best when all windows are the same size
- You can use Tools > Arrange Windows to do this
Switching tabs
When you activate Control Space
- "Search" will always be focused
You can type to filter, then:
- Click the item you want to open
- Use Tab / Arrow to navigate, and then hit Enter to switch tabs
- Or, just hit Enter to open first item
Focus
Note that a key concept in Control Space is focus.
The idea is that your hands need never leave the keyboard:
- Use the Arrow keys to "walk" in and out of the "Search" box
- Use Tab to jump through the main UI areas
- And Esc to always return to the Search input
Menus and shortcuts
You may have already seen that:
Panels, windows and items have a right click menus
And most commands have shortcut keys
Note that shortcut keys and right click menus operate:
- Primarily on the focused element
- Or if the focus is in a selection, on the selection
Organisation
Now that you're familiar with the UI, let's get you organised.
Tabs
You can move tabs around by:
- Dragging them
- Nudging them, using Alt+Arrows
- Cutting and pasting using Cmd+X and Cmd+`V
You can multi-select tabs – just like your desktop – using:
- Space
- Cmd+Click for single selections
- Shift+Click for contiguous-selection
- Or Shift+Arrows to walk the selection larger or smaller
To cancel:
- Hit Esc
- double-click an empty area
- Or click the cancel button on the selection toolbar control
A couple of tips for tab management:
- It's OK if your tabs become unstructured; just review when you need to
- If you're really not using something, close it or save it (and find it later)
Windows
Now you've organised your tabs, you'll want to organise your windows too:
- Click a window title to name it
- Type a name you want to use, then:
- Hit Tab to jump to next window
- Hit Enter to complete
- Or hit Esc to cancel
You can order windows by:
- Dragging them
- Nudging them with Shift+Alt+Arrows
If you have more windows than screen space:
- Scroll the background using the trackpad
- The mechanism isn't yet optimised for mouse only, so let me know if you're struggling with this!
A few tips on windows:
- Having named windows for every single category isn't so effective when you have more windows than screen space
- Around 3 - 5 windows of 5 - 15 tabs is a good target to aim for
- Perhaps create a "Daily" window, and a few project windows
Resources
Recent Tabs
The next thing to show you is Recent tabs:
It's a list of the tabs you last used, in the order that you used them.
They let you "jump back" to something quickly, rather than searching for a tab in the main workspace
When searching, Recent tabs also shows recently closed tabs!
To use Recent Tabs:
- From "Search" hit Down to "walk" into Recent Tabs
- Using your mouse, hover over the Sidebar
- Hit Enter to switch to any tab
Note that:
- Each time you use a tab, it jumps to the top of the list
- The current tab is hidden, making it faster to activate the previous tab
Saved Tabs
Saved tabs are Control Space's integrated take on Bookmarks, and allow you to save open tabs for later.
There's a slight bug with Saved Tabs where they won't save before you have a workspace set up
The easiest way to set it up, is to open the panel then follow the prompts
You can save tabs or windows by:
- Using you mouse todrag them into the panel (which will also close them)
- Using the right-click menu
- Or using the keyboard shortcuts Cmd+S for tabs or Shift+Cmd+S for windows
You can "Locate" folders in your Bookmarks:
- Through the right click menu
You can delete the folders you don't need with:
- A right-click
- The middle-mouse button
- Or Cmd+Backspace
Note that when you delete a Saved Tab or Folder, you have 10 seconds to undo.
A note about saved tabs...
One thing to mentioned about Saved Tabs before we continue...
- Saved Tabs was always meant to be a way to save complete "workspaces"
- That's why there three levels (workspace > window > tabs)
- As a solution for saving a few tabs here and there, it works OK, but it's not as useful as bookmarks when you have a lot of saved tabs
- As such, I'm working to find a better middle ground in a later version of Control Space
Tips
Control Space has lots of hidden UX goodies! Here's just a few...
Mouse
- double-click in an empty space to locate the active tab (open, filter, save, edit)
- middle-click to close / delete anything
Keyboard
Hit Esc to cancel every operation
Search everything and switch the side panel with Cmd+Arrows
Save and close entire windows from the dialog with Cmd+Enter
See the full list of shortcut keys from help (or Cmd+Click the help to go straight there)
UI
- You can type to filter without the Search input being active
- drag in text or documents containing links from other applications to open all of them
- Save tabs with // to give them a description
- bookmark tabs in chrome and they will show up in CS