Wandering electrons... but not too far

(I recently posted this subject in the Wish-list forum and my thanks to sgunhouse for telling me how to do this)

One of Opera's keyboard functionalities is the ability to cycle through open tabs using Ctrl+Tab. You can choose how Opera cycles the tabs in the Preferences dialog:

Tools > Preferences... > Advanced > Tabs -- Choose from the drop-down box under, "When cycling through tabs with Ctrl+Tab".

Your choices are:
Cycle without showing list
Cycle in recently used order
Cycle in tab bar order

If you choose "Cycle in recently used order" or "Cycle in tab bar order", by default, Opera will show a list of open tabs while you're cycling. You can furthermore indicate if you want Opera to show thumbnails in the list by checking or unchecking the box, "Show thumbnails in tab cycle".

If you choose "Cycle without showing list", Opera will cycle in tab bar order, but not show the list.

What's missing from these options is the ability to cycle in recently-used order, without showing the list. Indeed, displaying the list is not strictly necessary because when it's not shown, Opera simply jumps to the concerned tab with each Ctrl+Tab.

As it turns out, cycling in recently-used order was apparently default behavior under Windows in the past. You can thus "re-tell" Opera to do this via the Opera Settings File, a.k.a. "opera:config".

Here's how:

First, make sure that "Cycle without showing list" is chosen in the Preferences dialog (Tools > Preferences... > Advanced > Tabs -- Choose "Cycle without showing list" from the drop-down box under, "When cycling through tabs with Ctrl+Tab").

Then:

1. Open a new tab and type "opera:config" in the address bar (no quotation marks)
   
2. Click "User Prefs"
   
3. Find "Alternative Page Cycle Mode"
   
4. Set it to "0"
   
5. Scrrrroooooooooolllll down and click "Save"
   

Enjoy!

See the Wish-list Forum post that I put up on December 11th, for a few more points concerning tab cycling in Opera:

Add (bring back?) "Cycle in recently used order without showing list"

Version 9.5 of our beloved Opera browser has arrived, and with it a pretty good number of changes.

You can of course just "upgrade" your browser. What I mean by that is you go to the download page and install the new version over the old version. But with a relatively major upgrade such as 9.5, it might be (understand "is") worth it to do a clean re-install. When you've been using Opera for a long time, all the customizations, plus the upgrades, plus this and that, can start to have a negative impact on performance (Like Windows does as time passes). Sometimes a good thorough scrubbing is a really good thing. And here, with a major upgrade, certain unanticipated problems may appear that can be avoided by starting with a clean slate.

So!

Read more...

Although they're delivered with default setups, Opera's toolbars are designed to be just "holders" within which you have almost total liberty to do as you please.

Why not use this liberty to better organize temporary bookmarks? Here's how...

Read more...

By default in Opera, Ctrl+F will open the "Find" dialog, as in any program, with which you can search the text of a webpage. This Find dialog gives you the most control over your search but it can be clumsy to use. If you would prefer a less combersome interface, while maintaining a certain efficiency in text searching you can use "Integrated Search".

Read more...

Tooltips are the little yellow boxes that appear when you hover on certain elements. You might have noticed that Opera seems to have more of them than other browsers. It's not your imagination.

Read more...