The command bar

Search and bangs

A search engine per profile, your own search shortcuts, and over 13,000 bangs that work offline.

This page is a first draft. It may change before the public beta.

Search engine per profile

Each profile has its own search engine, set in Settings → Profiles: Google (the default), DuckDuckGo, Bing, Brave Search, Kagi, Ecosia, Startpage or Perplexity.

Bangs

Start with ! and a keyword to search one site directly: !w swift, !mdn fetch, !gh arx.

Recording planned

Type '!gh capturecontext' in the command bar and land on GitHub's search results; then type 'yt', press Tab, and search YouTube.

Arx looks for the keyword in your own search shortcuts first, then in its bundled list of over 13,000 bangs from Helium. The list ships with Arx and works offline. A bang it doesn't know shows a message and suggestions; it's never quietly treated as a normal search.

Your search shortcuts

A search shortcut is a keyword and a URL template. Type the keyword and press Tab to search that site, or use it as a bang.

Arx starts with three: gh for GitHub, yt for YouTube and w for Wikipedia. Manage them in Settings → General → Manage Search Shortcuts…:

  • Add, edit, turn off, delete or reset a shortcut.
  • The template needs exactly one {query}, as a whole query value or a path segment. A homepage is optional.
  • Keywords must be unique and use letters, numbers, dashes or underscores.
  • The bundled bangs are listed there too, read-only.