Use spotlight (or Alfred) to open an existing chrome tab

gmailgoogle-chromespotlight

I want to easily jump to gmail as one of many (many, many) open tabs in Chrome.

If I could just type "gmail" into Spotlight and it would take me to that tab in Chrome, that would work great for me. Or if there was a way to get gmail in the top-level Cmd+Tab list, that'd work too. Anyone know a way to do this?

On Windows, I made gmail its own "app", because Chrome lets you do that in Windows. That means that Alt+Tab can bring you directly to gmail, ignoring other Chrome windows. Unfortunately, Chrome for Mac doesn't allow making web pages into apps, so that route doesn't work. (I used https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/app-launcher-for-gmail/mlbjackfgfafcnpfaanflcjoknkhofnh for a time, and it worked ok [but didn't have my Chrome extensions, like Boomerang], but lately it's been busted.)

I use Vimium and its Vomnibar is like spotlight, but you have to first focus chrome and then be on a page on which you haven't disabled Vimium (e.g. I disable Vimium for google docs and similar rich apps), so it's not ideal either.

Best Answer

There is a workaround that I use. And it's not that hard. It's called "Nativefier".

Nativefier is a command line tool that allows you to easily create a desktop application for any web site with succinct and minimal configuration. Apps are wrapped by Electron in an OS executable (.app, .exe, etc.) for use on Windows, OSX and Linux.

So what this means is that you can create a app(that can be added to you're dock) for one webpage in Chrome for example. So you can easily use Cmd+Tab to switch apps. You just need a bit of 'command line' experience to achieve all this.

Full tutorial can be found here; https://www.npmjs.com/package/nativefier