Find any Safari window or tab in a few keystrokes

What Flick does with Safari

• Every window is a row. Three Safari windows are three rows, each titled with the page it's showing, on whichever Space or display it's on, minimized and full-screen windows included (every window, not every app).
• Tabs in search, with a license. Type a few letters of a tab's title or address and each matching tab gets a row of its own; let go, and Safari comes forward on that tab. One search covers every Safari window's tabs at once (browser tabs).
• A window's tabs, one key away. A Safari window with more than one tab shows how many it has. Press → or click the count to list them, with the current tab selected.

Set it up

1. Turn on Safari

   In Flick's Settings › Browser Tabs, switch on Safari. Browser tabs come with a license.

2. Turn on Include private windows

   It's on the same page. Until it's on, the note under Safari reads “Turn on Include private windows below to list the tabs of Safari.” The next section explains why.

3. Allow Flick to control Safari

   macOS now asks, once, whether Flick may control Safari; if Safari is closed, it asks when you next open it. Said no by mistake? Here's how to allow browser control.

Why Safari needs Include private windows

Flick gets tabs by asking each browser for them. Chrome, Brave and Edge mark their incognito windows, so Flick can skip those without ever asking for their tabs. Safari doesn't tell other apps which of its windows are private: to Flick, every Safari window looks the same. Since it can't leave the private ones out, it reads Safari only once you've said private windows may be included.

So with it on, tabs in Safari's private windows show up in search like any other tab, and so do the private tabs of the other browsers you turned on: one setting covers them all. Private or not, Flick keeps only a tab's title, site and path, in memory, and never reads the page itself (privacy policy).

The setting is about tabs only. The window list shows every Safari window, private ones included, either way.

Safari's own tools

Safari has good tools of its own, and they need no license. From Apple's Safari keyboard shortcuts:

• Tab overview. Press ⇧⌘\ to see the window's tabs as thumbnails. Flick shows no previews, so when you'd know the page by sight rather than by its title, tab overview is the better tool.
• Next and previous tab. ⌃Tab or ⇧⌘] moves to the next tab; ⌃⇧Tab or ⇧⌘[ to the previous one.
• Tabs by number. Turn on the option in Safari › Settings › Tabs, and ⌘ with a number selects a tab by its position (Apple). Apple's keyboard shortcut list says ⌘1 to ⌘8 select the first eight tabs and ⌘9 the last one; its Arrange tabs page, and its shortcut lists for macOS 14 and macOS 15, call ⌘9 the ninth tab.
• Another Safari window. ⌘` switches to another Safari window.
• Fewer windows. Window › Merge All Windows turns every Safari window into tabs of one; Window › Move Tab to New Window does the opposite.

Flick's part is everything across windows and apps. More ways to find a tab, with or without Flick: how to search Safari tabs on a Mac.

Keys

Using ⌘Tab instead? Swap ⌥ for ⌘, or see all the keyboard shortcuts.

Good to know

Flick switches to Safari tabs but never closes or rearranges them, and it sees only the tabs open on this Mac, not the ones open on your other devices.

Questions