In XMod Pro 4, finding a file to edit meant browsing for it.
The Control Panel had a separate button for each kind of file: Manage Forms, Manage Templates, Manage Feeds. Click one and you got a grid of that one type, showing its name, whether it was in use, and when it was created and last changed. You could sort the grid by name or by date. That was the whole toolkit. There was no search box.
So finding something was a two-step chore. First you had to know what kind of file it was, because forms, templates, and feeds each sat behind their own button in their own list. Then, once you were in the right list, you sorted it and paged through until the name you wanted scrolled into view. On a site with a couple dozen forms that’s manageable. On a site that’s grown for years, you spend more time locating the file than editing it.
Search: Ctrl+K finds anything
Version 5 replaces the browsing with searching. Click the magnifying glass in the toolbar or press Ctrl+K from anywhere in the Control Panel, and start typing. One box searches all of it at once: forms, views (what version 4 called templates), feeds, and projects, which are new to 5. You don’t decide what kind of thing you’re hunting for before you go looking. You type the name, and the results come back grouped by type, each group labeled and counted, and every result shows when it was last modified.
The results carry the same color-coded icons as the tabs, so a form and a view that share a name are still easy to tell apart in the list. Blue is the form, green is the view, right there in the results before you open either one. And if you already know you’re after a feed, the type filters across the top narrow the list to just that kind.
It also doesn’t hold you to the exact name. The matching is fuzzy, so a close-enough guess still surfaces the file even when you can’t quite remember what you called it. Projects get a little extra reach: the search looks inside a project’s description, not just its name, so you can find one by what it’s for when the name escapes you.
The whole thing works from the keyboard. Arrow through the results, press Enter to open the highlighted one in a tab, Esc to close. You go from “I need that form” to having it open without your hands leaving the keys.
Commands: type > to do things
You might have noticed what the search box says: “Search resources or type > for commands.” That’s the other half of this feature.
Type > and the box changes jobs. Instead of finding files, it runs commands, the same idea as the command palette in VS Code, where one keystroke turns search into a launcher for everything the app can do.
The commands are grouped by what they’re for. You can create any resource without hunting for a button: New Form, New View, New Feed, New Project. You can jump around the Control Panel with Go to Dashboard, Go to Forms, Go to Feeds, and land in the right section without clicking through the interface. There’s a set that toggles parts of the workspace, like showing or hiding the Explorer sidebar or going fullscreen. And the tab housekeeping from the editor is here too: Close Tab, Close All Tabs, Close Other Tabs, run by name instead of by right-click.
Many commands also have an alias, listed right beside them, that speeds things up even more. New Form is nf. Go to Projects is gp. Close Tab is ct. Type >nf, press Enter, and you’ve got a new form without touching the mouse. A few commands also have dedicated keystrokes, like Ctrl+B for the Explorer and F11 for fullscreen, so the things you do constantly don’t even need the palette.
Two of these commands point at features big enough to need their own posts: Database Tools, for building and managing SQL tables right inside XMod Pro, and the Explorer sidebar, a separate way to find and manage your files that does much more than the palette. Both will get their own write-ups.
From a single box, opened with one keystroke, you can search, create, navigate, and manage your tabs without reaching for the mouse. The mouse still works, and plenty of people will stick with it. But if you’d rather keep your hands on the keys, version 5 lets you do more and more that way the deeper you go. I’ll return to this theme when I get to the Form Builder.
Global search and commands are in the public beta now. If you’re a current XMod Pro customer, you can download it from the Downloads section and try it on a test site. The announcement post has the details on requirements, the 90-day expiry, and how to report anything you run into.
Discuss the Beta