It’s not every day that a new pattern emerges across the web, but I think cmd + k is here to stay. It’s a keyboard shortcut that usually pops open a search UI and it lets you toggle settings on or off, such as dark mode. And lots of apps support it now—Slack, Notion, Linear, and Sentry (my current gig) are the ones that I’ve noticed lately, but I’m sure tons of others have started picking up on this pattern.
Speaking of which, this looks like a great project:
kbar is a fully extensible command+k interface for your site
My only hope is that more websites and applications start to support it in the future—with kbar being a great tool to help spread the good word about this shortcut.
Totally! A generalised search interface based on a key combination that doesn’t even exist on 90% of keyboards sounds like a perfect fit for the web! /s
Agreed! Does the author mean ctrl+k, alt+k, or win/super+k? ;-)
You can just use Ctrl+k, the logo is just the Mac meta key.
I love using interfaces like this within apps, but in my experience there really isn’t convergence around the key command itself. VS Code uses
⌘+⇧+Pfor its command palette. Figma uses⌘+/. Alfred defaults to⌥+space. Spotlight is⌘+space.⌘+Kis natively (and in Google Docs) “Insert Link,” and Slack and Discord are the ones that break the pattern.I’d want a solution that would enable developers to set defaults for their application and users to able to change it.
There already seems to be a division between ctrl/cmd+k and ctrl/cmd+p
I wonder which will win out eventually?
There is a better implementation of such interface for laravel
https://github.com/livewire-ui/spotlight
Recently I needed the same thing for myself but I don’t use React…
So, I wrote web components for this, framework agnostic. Can be used in Vue, vanilla js project and React or any framework
https://github.com/ssleptsov/ninja-keys
Cmd-K is the shortcut to create links for ages. Slack breaks this pattern.
Simply typing “/” focusses search in nearly every website and is easy to type. It works.
use that. Let’s not break an existing shortcut.