Find pages you've visited by typing a few letters in Overlay's address bar
You read something a few days ago, you remember two words from the title, and the URL is gone. Until now, in Overlay the only way back was to search the web again. Now the address bar looks it up for you.
Press ⌘L to open the address bar, or use the big search box on a new tab, and start typing. Matching pages appear underneath, drawn from three places: pages you've visited in Overlay, the quick links on your new-tab page, and pages already open in other tabs.
What it matches
Both the page title and the URL count. Several words separated by spaces all have to match, so github issue finds GitHub pages about issues and nothing
else. Full-width characters are treated like normal ones.
If you read pages in Chinese, titles can be found by the characters themselves, by full pinyin, or by pinyin initials — zhihu or 知乎 finds Zhihu,
xhs finds 小红书 (Xiaohongshu), and Traditional characters like 飛書 find a page titled in Simplified, 飞书云文档.
Pages you visit often, visited recently, or opened yourself from the address bar rank higher. A page you clicked into once, days ago, drops down the list
but still turns up if its title matches. One site gets at most 3 rows, so typing git doesn't fill the list with near-identical GitHub URLs. If you're after a
specific page, type a path with a / in it (github.com/apple) and that limit goes away.
Where Enter goes
The first row is always what Enter will do.
When you type the start of a web address, say git, the field fills in github.com, with the added part selected. Keep typing to overwrite it, press ⇥ to
accept it, or ⌫ to remove it. A page you visit a lot that matches closely moves to the first row, so 知乎 + Enter takes you to Zhihu. When nothing matches
well enough, the first row is a Google search for what you typed, and Enter searches; press ↓ to pick one of the pages below instead.
Use ↑↓ to pick another row, and ⌘⏎ to open it in a new tab. ⎋ once closes the list and drops the completion; ⎋ again hides the address bar.
Pages that are already open
If the page you're looking for is open in another tab, its row says "Switch to tab", and Enter jumps there instead of opening a duplicate. If you started from an empty new tab, that tab is closed for you on the way.
Removing an entry
Highlight a row you don't want to see again with ↑↓ and press fn+⇧+⌫ (⇧⌦ on a full keyboard), or click the ✕ at the end of the row. That removes it from history. "Clear all" on the new-tab page's Recent visits card wipes the whole history, leaving only quick links and open tabs in suggestions.
It stays on your Mac
Nothing is sent anywhere while you type. Matching and ranking happen locally, and your history is a file on your Mac. That's also why there are no "popular searches" suggestions in the list — those require sending every keystroke to a search engine, and Overlay doesn't.
What it isn't
This isn't a full browser history manager. There's no page for browsing history by date, no importing from Safari or Chrome, and the search engine is currently fixed to Google. If years of your browsing live in Chrome and you find things through Chrome's address bar, Chrome simply has much more data to work with. This is for the handful of web tools you reopen all day in a floating panel, so they're two or three keystrokes away.
It's in Overlay 2.1 and later, and there's nothing to turn on.