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TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

omar.website

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Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#41

Post by sho_hn »

KDE on Linux used to have something similar in the late 90s - it allowed you to open a website URL as a directory listing, so you could browse the site's asset directories and open image files, etc. Think like a client-side generated version of Apache's index pages, but using your local file manager. It was a plugin to the VFS framework (KIO) the desktop and all the apps use, so it would also work e.g. in Open File dialogs from anywhere within the toolset.

I remember using this regularly to mass-download the images embedded into a page - open the page this way by replacing http:// with a pseudo-protocol, copy all, paste, done.

KDE always came with a lot of VFS trickery like that. Ripping a music CD into MP3s was similar - you'd open the volume in the file manager and see your tracks along with a virtual folder full of MP3 files. The rip and encoding would happen on the fly, and you could do this e.g. straight from the file attach feature in an instant messenger.

Desktop Linux was a lot less friendly to get working smoothly back then compared to now, and feature discovery was by word of mouth more than anything, but it sure felt like living in the future early.

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#42

Post by 22c »

I had been looking for a way to "scriptably" sort the Firefox tabs I have open. Unfortunately by cursory glance this would not allow us to change the order of tabs (AKA the index).

Very cool idea though and looking forward to seeing what comes of it.

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#43

Post by _flux »

rohan1024 wrote: post #26
yudlejoza wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1 - Right-click empty space next to the tabs and select 'Bookmark all tabs' 2 - Name the bookmark folder (within the top-level bookmark folder) something like: 'Tab-mess-from- ' 3 - Ctrl-F4 close them. Press and hold Ctrl, then F4 them one at a time. You can close 200+ tabs in a minute. (or as other suggested, right-click any tab and use the option 'close other tabs').

> Ctrl-F4 close them. Press and hold Ctrl, then F4 them one at a time. Ctrl-F4 shuts down entire browser, Ctrl-W closes each tab with a press of w. This is behavior in Ubuntu and it holds true for most application windows.

Alt-F4 closes the entire browser, and indeed Ctrl-F4 closes the current tab. (Just tried it out, I've always used Ctrl-W for that.)

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#44

Post by _flux »

yudlejoza wrote: post #19
cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #3

This is a brilliant piece of work. As someone who has thousands of tabs open, I've always wanted to "close all tabs with a single command", or view all the open tabs and mass select them and close, for years. Otherwise, going through them one by one and deleting takes forever. Now somebody make a vim pluggin so I can delete tabs by visual selecting a bunch of them and typing "d".

1 - Right-click empty space next to the tabs and select 'Bookmark all tabs' 2 - Name the bookmark folder (within the top-level bookmark folder) something like: 'Tab-mess-from- ' 3 - Ctrl-F4 close them. Press and hold Ctrl, then F4 them one at a time. You can close 200+ tabs in a minute. (or as other suggested, right-click any tab and use the option 'close other tabs').

I've used this extension for doing mass closes: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sorted-tabs/

As a bonus you can arrange URLs by name, url, or time next to each other, so it's usually fast to churn through related or duplicate tabs.

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#46

Post by ksec »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #3

This is a brilliant piece of work. As someone who has thousands of tabs open, I've always wanted to "close all tabs with a single command", or view all the open tabs and mass select them and close, for years. Otherwise, going through them one by one and deleting takes forever. Now somebody make a vim pluggin so I can delete tabs by visual selecting a bunch of them and typing "d".

Same here, currently sitting at 300 tabs ( Lost about 800 a few weeks ago from Safari crash again ). I just wish the Show All tabs on Safari put up a list of tabs so I could quickly navigate through them ( and selectively close them ). Right now Show All Tabs Reloads all the tabs. That is the same on macOS and iOS. Your phone gets quite warm doing it.

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#47

Post by amdbcg »

wutbrodo wrote: post #24

Wow, this is awesome! My OS is heavily scripted and keybound, thanks to 15 years of cumulative incremental fixes and a kick-ass WM. The one thing that's frustrated me is the relative black box that my browser represents, and writing a shim between my WM and browser tabs has been on my TODO list for a long, long time (through a couple of aborted attempts due to a combination of Chrome's at-the-time obsolete documentat…

would you mind providing context /docs to some of your fixes and scripts so I can observe/install some of them?

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#48

Post by freetonik »

TekMol wrote: post #45

What is the tool used in the example where they select files and then delete them? https://omar.website/tabfs/doc/delete.mp4 Ah, I see now. It is called "dired". I wonder if it can be used standalone, without emacs.

You might like Ranger[1]. It's not dired, but has similar rich set of features.

[1]: https://github.com/ranger/ranger

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#49

Post by viraptor »

sho_hn wrote: post #41

KDE on Linux used to have something similar in the late 90s - it allowed you to open a website URL as a directory listing, so you could browse the site's asset directories and open image files, etc. Think like a client-side generated version of Apache's index pages, but using your local file manager. It was a plugin to the VFS framework (KIO) the desktop and all the apps use, so it would also work e.g. in Open File d…

I suspect it would be harder to pull off these days without launching chrome headless for example. Opening the page itself wouldn't include images/resources loaded over JS. It would also not work great with image atlases.

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#50

Post by mgaw »

TekMol wrote: post #45

What is the tool used in the example where they select files and then delete them? https://omar.website/tabfs/doc/delete.mp4 Ah, I see now. It is called "dired". I wonder if it can be used standalone, without emacs.

There is also `vidir` which is part of `moreutils`:

https://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/

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