Hacker News Reader

Comment by pythonlover2153 | Hacker News Reader

CTRL+L works for that too on Chromium / Firefox.

Not if you choose to have separate URL and search bars. In that case, Ctrl-L goes to the URL bar, and Ctrl-K goes to the search bar.

Honest question, what's the use case for separate url and search bars?

I keep them separate for two reasons: one privacy, and another preference:

1. If I'm interacting with the URL/address input, I'm either entering a full URL, or searching through my local history to jump to a previously-visited page (or, in Firefox, a tab I may have open on another device). I don't want that shipped off to my search provider for autocomplete suggestions.

2. If I'm interacting with the search input, I want autocomplete suggestions. Additionally, because it retains the value of the last term I searched for, I can use it as a shortcut to jump back to the results if I no longer have the tab handy.

It prevents you from leaking data in cases where you like live search suggestions (like completions from your search engine based on partial text entered) but didn't want your search engine recording all the URLs you visit outside of search.

And F6 is one of them, but I can't remember which one.

At least in Firefox there is still a difference even if you don't have a separate search bar. Ctrl-K goes to the URL bar as a search in your default search engine while Ctrl-L goes to the URL bar in whatever mode it currently is in. This mostly matters if you disable searching by default in the URL bar but still search from the URL bar, although there is also a visual indication that you are searching with Ctrl-K in the default configuration.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com