In this guide
Two palettes, one shortcut
Pinodock has two launcher surfaces that share the same keyboard shortcut:
| Surface | Shortcut | When it appears |
|---|---|---|
| New tab launcher | ⌘K (Mac) · Ctrl+K (Win) | Embedded in the new tab page |
| On-page palette | ⌘Shift+P (Mac) · Ctrl+Shift+P (Win) | Floating overlay on any website |
The new tab launcher is the full-featured version: search, frequency ranking, snippets, tab switching, download search, command palette, AI assistant, recent searches. The on-page palette is leaner — it focuses on actions relevant to the page you're currently viewing, plus search and standard commands.
Context bubbles are the main visual difference between the two. They appear below the search input when you haven't typed anything yet.
New tab: productivity bubbles
Open the new tab launcher (⌘K) and before you type anything, you'll see a row of rounded pill buttons below the search input. These are your productivity bubbles — one-click shortcuts to the five most useful panels:
| Bubble | What it does |
|---|---|
| ✅ Todos | Opens the Todos panel — your full task list |
| 📚 Reading | Opens the Reading List — articles you've saved |
| ✂️ Snippets | Opens the Snippets panel — reusable text and code |
| ✏️ Highlights | Opens the Highlights panel — text marked on web pages |
| 📋 Clipboard | Opens the Clipboard History panel |
These bubble into view when the launcher is empty, so they're always one click away from any search session. They're especially useful at the start of a work session — open the launcher, click Todos, review today's tasks, close the launcher, and get to work.
Recently used commands
Below the productivity bubbles, before you type anything, the launcher shows a Recently used section. This lists the last five commands, searches, or items you activated — sorted by most recently used, not by frequency.
If you ran a /translate hello to spanish yesterday, it appears in Recently used. If you opened a specific bookmark, it appears. Click any item to re-run it immediately. This is particularly useful for commands that take arguments — you can re-run the translation with a different word by clicking the recent entry to pre-fill the query, then editing it.
Recent items are stored locally using Pinodock's command frequency system. They persist across browser restarts. The list resets if you clear Pinodock's storage from Settings → Data.
Frequency-ranked search results
When you type a search query, results aren't just sorted by string match quality. Pinodock's launcher uses a three-factor ranking formula:
- Fuzzy match score (55%): how well the query matches the item label — exact prefix matches score highest, fuzzy character matches score lower
- Frequency score (30%): logarithmic scale based on how many times you've activated this item — 1 use ≈ 0.1 score, 10 uses ≈ 1.0 score
- Recency score (15%): exponential decay with a 14-day half-life — items you used yesterday rank higher than items you used three weeks ago
In practice this means the launcher adapts to your workflow over time. If you always open the same three GitHub repositories from the launcher, they float to the top of tab search results. If you frequently use /jwt to decode tokens, it appears first when you type /j.
The system learns without any setup. It's always on, storing usage counts in chrome.storage.local.
On any page: page-action bubbles
Press ⌘Shift+P on any website and the on-page palette opens as a floating overlay. The quick-action grid at the top shows nine actions relevant to the page you're on:
| Action | What it does |
|---|---|
| 📋 Copy URL | Copies the current page URL to clipboard and closes the palette |
| 📝 Copy Markdown | Copies [Page Title](URL) — ready to paste into Markdown documents |
| 📖 Reader Mode | Strips navigation, ads, and sidebars — displays the article in a clean reading view |
| 🖊 Highlight | Saves the currently selected text as a highlight in your Highlights panel |
| 📸 Screenshot | Captures the visible tab as a PNG and opens it in a new tab |
| 📱 QR Code | Generates a QR code for the current URL — click to download as PNG |
| 🔗 UTM Builder | Appends UTM campaign parameters to the current URL |
| 🎨 Pick Color | Activates the eyedropper to sample any color from the page |
| ⚡ Encode URL | URL-encodes the current page URL — useful for building API calls |
Keyboard shortcuts: number keys 1–9 trigger the actions directly when the palette is open and the input is empty, in order from the grid.
Highlight action
Select text on any page, open the palette with ⌘Shift+P, and click Highlight (or press 4). Pinodock saves the selected text as a highlight with:
- The text content
- The surrounding context (30 characters before and after — used to re-locate the text later)
- The page URL and title
- A timestamp
- A default yellow color (#FFE066)
The highlight appears immediately in the Highlights panel on your new tab. You can assign it to a project, add tags, or change the color from there.
If no text is selected when you click Highlight, nothing happens — the action silently skips.
Screenshot action
Click Screenshot (or press 5) to capture the currently visible area of the tab. The screenshot uses Chrome's captureVisibleTab API, which captures what's visible in the viewport at the time — full-width, full resolution.
The captured PNG opens in a new tab, where you can:
- Right-click → Save image as… to download it
- Right-click → Copy image to copy it to the clipboard
- Use the browser's address bar to share the data URL (note: data URLs are local, not shareable)
The screenshot doesn't include the browser chrome, tabs, or Pinodock overlay — only the page content.
Reader Mode
Click Reader Mode to strip the current page of navigation bars, sidebars, ads, and cookie banners. The cleaned article text renders in a minimal reading view with a comfortable line width and font size.
Reader Mode works best on news articles, blog posts, and documentation pages. It's less useful on web apps, dashboards, or pages that are entirely navigation.
Click Reader Mode again (or press Escape in the palette and re-open it) to toggle back to the original page layout.
Copy URL and Copy Markdown
Copy URL is the fastest way to share a page — one keyboard shortcut, no mouse. ⌘Shift+P then 1.
Copy Markdown is the developer and writer's shortcut. It produces [Page Title](https://example.com/article) — paste it directly into Notion, Obsidian, GitHub PRs, Slack messages, or any other Markdown surface. No manual copying of URL and title separately.
All 60+ commands with /help
Type /help in either the new tab launcher or the on-page palette to see all available commands. Commands are grouped by category:
| Category | Sample commands |
|---|---|
| Navigation | /tab, /bm, /dl, /rl |
| Create | /todo, /note, /snip, /save |
| Tools | /uuid, /color, /jwt, /qr, /hash |
| Markdown | /mdpad, /tomd, /csvtable, /json2md |
| AI | /ask, /ai, /rag, /skills |
| Search | > (open tabs), // (history), = (calculator) |
| Units | 5 kg to lbs, 100f to c, $50 to EUR |
| Date math | tomorrow, +7d, next monday |
Click any command in the /help list to insert it directly into the search input. Commands with parameters (like /translate {text} to {language}) are inserted with the cursor positioned after the command prefix, ready for you to type the argument.
/ in the launcher and stop — you'll see the command suggestions dropdown, ranked by how often you use each command. This is faster than opening /help when you know the command exists but can't remember the exact prefix.
The palette is the fastest path to most Pinodock features. Muscle memory for three or four commands — /todo to add a task, /clip to search clipboard, ⌘Shift+P + 1 to copy the URL — turns the extension from a dashboard into a genuine productivity layer on top of the browser.
→ Deep dive: the full command palette reference