Easy When You Know How
Worried about coping with the daily demands of his new Deputy Editor role, Robert Irvine tries to…
Robert Irvine simplifies his workflow using Vivaldi
Command Chains gives you more time to stare out the window, eating crisps
One of my favourite geeky web resources is Google Books Ngram Viewer ( www.snipca.com/39331), which helps you pinpoint when a specific word, name or phrase first appeared in print, and track its prevalence over time. The word “codswallop”, for example, traces back to the 1870s and crops up frequently in reports of parliamentary debates.
I thought of Ngram – and codswallop, incidentally – while waiting to be inducted into my new job. While I’m delighted to have joined Computeractive, and rejoined its parent company, I’d forgotten that starting employment invariably involves sitting through a tedious introductory presentation, full of corporate jargon about “synergy”, being “results driven” and “optimising workflow”.
When did the word “workflow” become common parlance, I wondered? Ngram suggests it’s been around since the 1960s, but significantly took off in the early 1990s, following the rise of the systems analyst. More importantly, how was I supposed to optimise my own workflow, to avoid letting down my team and employer?
I found a potential answer in the brilliant Vivaldi ( https://vivaldi.com), which we described in Issue 611 as a “much more innovative browser than Chrome or Edge”. Vivaldi has just added a clever new feature called Command Chains, which lets you perform a sequence of everyday tasks using a single shortcut. This helps you simplify your workflow, giving you more time to stare out of the window, while eating crisps.
Excited by this results-driven approach, I launched Vivaldi, updated it to its latest version (4.1, at the time of writing) and looked for Command Chains. Now, I love Vivaldi, but it can be a bit confusing and the new feature wasn’t clearly flagged. I found it by clicking the Vivaldi button in the top-left corner, then choosing Settings and picking the most likely location, which was Quick Commands. I scrolled down and – lo and behold – there was the Command Chains section, with three options to choose from.
The best of these was called ‘Open Links and Tile’ (see screenshot above), which launches a predetermined set of web pages, stacks their tabs for easy access and tiles the pages vertically, so you can see all their content at once (see screenshot above right). This sounded like a great way to start my day, rather than wasting time manually opening multiple tabs, so I changed the default tabs (which are all Vivaldi pages) to Computeractiverelevant sites, including our Facebook and Twitter accounts, as well as BBC Technology News. I then clicked the button to ‘Test Chain’ and watched the magic happen, as my preferred tabs opened, stacked and tiled before my eyes.
The next step was to work out how to create a shortcut to run this command chain, as this option was also far from obvious. I eventually located it in the Keyboard section of Vivaldi’s Settings, where it was typically right at the bottom. I clicked the plus sign next to Chains and there was my ‘Open Links and Tile’ chain. I then clicked in the shortcut box and pressed the keys for my desired keyboard shortcut: Shift+c, since you ask – simple but effective! I tested the shortcut and it worked like a dream.
Vivaldi’s other default Command Chains weren’t as useful, but I was intrigued to discover that you can create your own. I clicked the plus sign in the bottom-left corner of the Command Chains section (in Settings then Quick Commands), and scrolled through the long list of available commands. By selecting one as my first command, and then clicking the plus sign to add further tasks, I was able to create a command chain that checks Vivaldi for updates, deletes the browsing data from my previous session, mutes all tabs in case any contain noisy video ads and moves my cursor to the browser’s address bar. And if that isn’t optimising my workflow, then I’d like to hear a better idea!
Need help improving your workflow? Let us know: noproblem@computeractive.co.uk