User input and advanced pickers

[nixith]

Hello! I found this browser yesterday and it looks like the perfect next project for me to continue my config addiction habit. I'm currently using Tridactyl, and one of the things I really enjoyed using was the popup selector.

tab gets there for the tab selector for most things. However, it's a somewhat simple picker, and it would be nice to be able to use it for other things.

For simplicity, I would again use tridactyl as an example. My tabs are a mess, and sometimes I'm not sure which window where is playing audio. It looks like the tab selector has knowledge of this (as evidenced by the emoji), but in tridactyl I could (kinda, I think this is just due to how it was implemented) filter to audio tabs by searching for A.

Additionally, tab can only search within a window, and I don't see a way to search for all glide tabs across all windows.

As for my second point, a dynamic picker could take a lot of this burden off of you. I could get my own list of global tabs and feed them in. For all I know this exists and I couldn't find the documentation. The closest I found was

glide/src/glide/browser/base/content/browser-excmds-registry.mts

Line 157 in 8171c5c

args_schema: { tab_index: { type: "integer", required: true, position: 0 } } as const satisfies ArgumentsSchema,

but that looks like internal magik rather than something that can be passed and used by an end user.

In terms of why someone might want this, it lets users cover use cases not yet thought of or too niche to go into the main browser. I could fix taball, people used to a drun style script could easily fill a pickable list, users could easily filter their lists in typescript, etc. For something concrete I would love the ability to be on a github/codeberg page and select a runnable from a nix flake, and I'm sure others out there have their own fun hyper-specific use cases for browser side user input as well.

[RobertCraigie]

but that looks like internal magik rather than something that can be passed and used by an end user.

that is correct, unfortunately the commandline has no public API for customising anything yet.

this is definitely something I want to do, the biggest blocker is just figuring out the right API which is quite a challenge.

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If I'm understanding correctly, what you'd also like is some builtin / blessed pattern for creating pickers yourself, e.g. like vim.ui.select()? Agree that would be a nice feature.

in case it's helpful, you can insert custom dom elements into the browser UI yourself, see this example in the builtin which-key plugin:

glide/src/glide/browser/base/content/plugins/which-key.mts

Line 51 in 4bc917e

this.#element = sandbox.DOM.create_element("div", {

you can't register event listeners yet, so you'd only be able to navigate the picker with custom keymaps or glide.keys.next().

[nixith]

Yeah you've isolated the issues I had, and I feel you on the difficulty of designing APIs. I suppose you could manage a "picker" mode of sorts for the keybinds, which wouldn't be too bad. That + the dom seems to be what tridactyl does, so that's at least parity until the eventual builtin method that exists with something like the command line.