When it comes to booters, the most famous are Alfred on the Mac and Wox on Windows. What is an initiator? It consists of a command input box and a drop – down list of query results. The ability to tell a computer to perform a series of operations with a single command, like your housekeeper, is naturally a magic tool in many people’s minds.

For example, if I type Chrome and press Enter, the launcher automatically finds Chrome and opens it for me. For example, after encountering the command YD Steward, the initiator immediately queries youdao Dictionary and lists the definitions of the steward.

Steward is an Alfred-like launcher in Chrome, and in some ways even Alfred Plus.

An overview of the

In Chrome, most browser operations, such as extensions, bookmarks, TAB page management, and so on, can be done by simply typing certain commands through Steward.

Steward is an open source project hosted on Github, installed from the Chrome App Store, or downloaded offline from Oksteward.com.

Start with a chestnut in each hand:

I feel to stroll the website such as zhihu, headline, fried egg time is too much, as a result cannot concentrate on work study, can always hand cheap tube not live mouse, how to do! ?

Simply type the following commands into Steward’s command box


bk zhihu.com

bk toutiao.com

bk jandan.net

Copy the code

These sites will not be accessible unless you manually unblock them; If you don’t think this is thorough enough, you can use the BK8 command to enforce an 8-hour block. Mom no longer need to worry about my work and study!

More powerful chestnuts:

I will brush all kinds of science and technology, Internet articles and information every day, but there are so many websites, to open one by one, hand tired! There may be some forgotten, what is good? !

Just do this. Use Steward to create a Workflow with the title Technology Internet Information:


sspai.com

36kr.com

ifanr.com

readhub.me

donews.com

Copy the code

Type wF KJHLWZX or WF Technology or even WF KJ into the command box, and then press Enter and swipe, and they all come up in turn.

As you’ve probably noticed, the first one can also be made into workflow. How about that?

Steward can be compared to AdBlock, Stylish, and Vimium, and why, despite the fact that its help documentation is incredibly rich, let’s take a look at its evolution.

What the hell? I don’t care about the evolutionary path.

That’s okay. You can just look at the picture and you’ll see.

The reason

Personally, I like to collect all kinds of extensions, but with many installations, management is a hassle. I’ve tried many of the extension management tools in the Chrome App Store, but I’ve never been satisfied.

Back in late 2014, an efficiency freak who happened to be a front-end engineer new to MBP, Alfred inspired Steward, a command starter in the browser.

The development of

The initial

The first version was pretty rudimentary, took one night, and consisted of a simple popup box and two plugins: on to enable extensions and off to disable extensions.

At this point, the name was not Steward, but Ikkyu, the English name of the wise Ikkyu.

Although a little excited, after all, my first work, but the journey has just begun.

Support the pinyin

First, as a Chinese, there is no support for Chinese pinyin search, so use Pinyin to support it.

Who is

What followed was a long journey of discovery and development of various plugins, just like a child picking up shells on the beach. Every time they came across an idea, they would be pleasantly surprised and should immediately implement it, even though they would encounter various difficulties.

The Github COMMIT record shows each step:

  • Yd: Youdao search word, his: history query, todo: to-do list

  • Run: start the application, Po: pocket article query, del: expand delete

  • Bm: bookmark lookup, set: open extension Settings, bk: block websites

  • Dl: download record, help: help command

Support for new tabs

One day, IT occurred to me, why not put a New Tab on something I use so often?

The second of the three usage modes is New Tab

wallpaper

Found some ugly, how to do?

I decided to add wallpaper from Bing, a daily, automatic refresh.

At this point, Steward seems to have completed his self-discovery and begins to come into contact with his friends and colleagues.

confused

Until one day in 2017, I looked at Steward and realized that Steward had stagnated just like me.

With this uneasiness, Steward and Steward begin their path of rebirth.

rebirth

With the encouragement of one of the little frogs, starting with the UI, replacing the rounded input box suddenly makes Steward’s life a lot easier.

Tried to recommend it to the outside, looking at the Chrome extension backend users suddenly promoted, feel all come back

Thin hair

A closer look at Alfred and similar command starters reveals some commonalities that Steward should have but doesn’t.

The v2.5 Settings page arrives and you can customize the trigger of each command in the plugin.

After perfecting the help description, one day found beautiful wallpaper but helpless!

Next, add the Wallpaper Save button, and in the Settings panel you can set, download, and delete the wallpaper.

V2.6 weather query, url input, search engine search, due function gradually complete.

In V2.7, the “page mode” of the three modes arrived, allowing Steward to be invoked with shortcut keys on any page.

V2.8 adds almost all of Chrome’s native page urls, and allows you to open bookmarks, Help, Settings, and other menus and pages with a single command.

In V2.9, the plugin extension class, which interacts with other extensions in Steward (word cards), is arguably unique to Steward in the extension world, since they all have the same author.

The big improvements in V3.0 have led to occasional problems with Steward, which the author is still working on “midnight”, but seems to herald a bigger climax.

Steward arrived at V3.0 as a quasi-wizard until Workflows, a Stesteward feature in the launcher world, appeared in V3.1.

From then on, Steward was no longer limited to performing only one operation/command at a time, and began to have unlimited possibilities. He was fully qualified as an efficiency wizard and qualified as the Alfred Plus of Chrome. Of course, it still takes time to settle and users to explore.

The random plugin that arrived in V3.1.2, though seemingly unimpressive, pushes Steward beyond the traditional “New Tab” class extension. The New Tab is more than just a window dressing. For example, Steward can play the role of TodoList, bookmark manager, and word memorizer at the same time.

other

Steward function diagram

Steward was his first open source project and learned a lot from the open source community.

  • Technology stack: Webpack + Vue2, jQuery, Pinyin, etc

  • Design: do not understand design, how to do? Most of the ElementUI used to set up the page comes from iconfont.cn

  • Products: Learned how to maintain a product from Jane Joy and other excellent open source projects. Of course, Steward isn’t doing enough right now

Thanks to the above mentioned projects and authors.

About the future

In my opinion, Steward is endowed with great possibilities. At present and in the future, many ideas will be displayed and explored on Steward.

Browser Alfred, which has the same name as Steward but does not have the new TAB mode, updates the functionality synchronously.

To focus on Steward, and everything about it, is to focus on being more efficient.