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TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

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Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#61

Post by iam-TJ »

wutbrodo wrote: post #29
axbytg wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As someone who has thousands of tabs open This behavior always confuses me. To what end? Have you ever derived any value from a tab you chose not to close?

Hm, I'm kind of confused by your perspective here. Do you only have a single thread of tasks you're doing at any given time on your machine, all of whose resources are torn down and rebuilt from scratch when needed? I use my current laptop both for work and personally, and in my personal workspaces alone, I have at least half a dozen browser windows with ~20 tabs representing research that I'm doing or a task that I'…

May I recommend Zotero [0] to you?

"Your personal research assistant

Zotero is a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share research."

Like you I am an avaricious multi-tasker over extended periods of time and was heading towards the same state you appear to have reached.

I realised it was not optimal and did some research and discovered Zotero. I use it personally and require it at my businesses.

It adds several wonderful abilities - best is the ability to share and collaborate on research at will.

[0] https://www.zotero.org/

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#62

Post by franga2000 »

masa331 wrote: post #32
wutbrodo wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm, I'm kind of confused by your perspective here. Do you only have a single thread of tasks you're doing at any given time on your machine, all of whose resources are torn down and rebuilt from scratch when needed? I use my current laptop both for work and personally, and in my personal workspaces alone, I have at least half a dozen browser windows with ~20 tabs representing research that I'm doing or a task that I'…

Having hundreds or thousands open tabs also confuses me and always seems like a mess to me. The way i work: I mostly work on a one thing at a time. For that i can have probably at max 40 tabs open. Once it gets past some threshold(i don't recognize or remember what's in them) i tend to start to close the obsolete ones. If there is something i find useful i bookmark it. If there is something i think i would like to re…

I don't think I go into thousands, but easily accumulate a few 100 tabs. The way I work, I rarely have a task truly done in one go. Besides various side projects, I work on multiple websites for multiple clients and constantly need to put one on hold and wait for feedback, so I go work on another one. If I expect feedback withing a ~2 day period, it really doesn't make sense for me to close the related tabs. Not only does it save time when picking up the task again, but helps me reconstruct my train of thought without having to take notes.

The way I think of it is kind of like swap memory. Instead of wasting effort saving to disk and verifying the saved data (taking notes), I chuck the data somewhere it isn't in the way (a new virtual desktop) so I can pick it up later. In fact, this is exactly what happens with the tabs at the system level. Since I'm constantly running out of ram and have a stupid amount of swap space set up, my OS gladly swaps the relevant browser processes and unswap the relevant set.

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#63

Post by netsharc »

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".

Vivaldi has a tabs panel that lists all open tabs (as well as recently closed ones) like files in Windows Explorer, you can multi-select them and hit delete, or indeed hit Ctrl-A and delete. Sadly afaik there's no filter to e.g. select all Stack Overflow tabs.

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#64

Post by samb1729 »

Firerouge wrote: post #18
axbytg wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As someone who has thousands of tabs open This behavior always confuses me. To what end? Have you ever derived any value from a tab you chose not to close?

Chrome only preserves browsing history for 90 days. Keeping tabs open can work around that limitation

Without even bothering to check, this seems like it can't possibly be true. You are surely not saying that the billions of Chrome users worldwide have no browsing history from September or earlier, right?

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#65

Post by rohan1024 »

_flux wrote: post #43
rohan1024 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.)

My bad now I tried the Ctrl+F4 and yes it works exactly the way OP said. I assumed he was talking about Alt+F4 :)

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#66

Post by samb1729 »

wutbrodo wrote: post #29
axbytg wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As someone who has thousands of tabs open This behavior always confuses me. To what end? Have you ever derived any value from a tab you chose not to close?

Hm, I'm kind of confused by your perspective here. Do you only have a single thread of tasks you're doing at any given time on your machine, all of whose resources are torn down and rebuilt from scratch when needed? I use my current laptop both for work and personally, and in my personal workspaces alone, I have at least half a dozen browser windows with ~20 tabs representing research that I'm doing or a task that I'…

I cannot speak for the user you replied to, but to answer this question:

> Do you only have a single thread of tasks you're doing at any given time on your machine, all of whose resources are torn down and rebuilt from scratch when needed?

Yes, absolutely, at least when it comes to my web browser.

I run Firefox Nightly and intentionally use its prompt to restart for an update as a prompt to consider whether I should close the things I have open. I'll sometimes ignore the update for a few hours, but not usually longer than that.

If I need to retain some information over a period of more than a few hours, I'll transfer it to a note-taking app or something similar. Habitually not keeping a large number of tabs open helps me maintain focus to some extent, and deliberating over whether to close a tab or window presents and opportunity to think about extracting a snippet for storage elsewhere.

To me the idea of keeping an entire webpage open as a method of storing what is likely a very small subset of what it contains just doesn't seem "right", regardless of actual resource consumption on the computer I'm using.

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#67

Post by nine_k »

eitland wrote: post #55
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".

> 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. In Firefox you can right-click on a tab and close - all tabs - or all tabs to the right If you use tree style tabs you can also close a tree or a subtree. Edit: and there is an extension (yep :) to the tree style tab extension to allow you to export a subtree as a nested list of links -…

In Firefox, you can install the Tree-Style Tabs extension, and have a reasonable tree of tabs. It does resemble a filesystem tree a bit.

I think it's the most important extension for people who do heavy browsing, research things online, etc.

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#68

Post by samb1729 »

masa331 wrote: post #32
wutbrodo wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm, I'm kind of confused by your perspective here. Do you only have a single thread of tasks you're doing at any given time on your machine, all of whose resources are torn down and rebuilt from scratch when needed? I use my current laptop both for work and personally, and in my personal workspaces alone, I have at least half a dozen browser windows with ~20 tabs representing research that I'm doing or a task that I'…

Having hundreds or thousands open tabs also confuses me and always seems like a mess to me. The way i work: I mostly work on a one thing at a time. For that i can have probably at max 40 tabs open. Once it gets past some threshold(i don't recognize or remember what's in them) i tend to start to close the obsolete ones. If there is something i find useful i bookmark it. If there is something i think i would like to re…

> it brings peace to my mind.

Mine too.

My thoughts on this kind of thing aren't in any way backed by studies or research (I know some folks are sticklers for that sort of thing), but they essentially boil down to reflecting on human history.

The ability to store a huge amount of information and near-instantly recall it with these computery things we all love is an incredibly new development that I don't really consider compatible with my brain. If the brain is a somewhat general purpose computer that's been really slowly optimised by evolution, the alternative approach to ours is akin to* scheduling hundreds of threads on a small number of hardware threads. Doable? Sure. Ideal? Doesn't feel like it to me.

I've tried allowing myself to just continuously spawn tabs and it makes me uncomfortable much like it does to see a Windows desktop used as a dumping ground for whatever a person happens to want to save on their machine. Fortunately I almost never see the latter these days, and I'll choose to believe people don't do that anymore without verifying that assumption...

*this is really hand-wavy, please don't shoot.

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#69

Post by mark_l_watson »

samb1729 wrote: post #66
wutbrodo wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm, I'm kind of confused by your perspective here. Do you only have a single thread of tasks you're doing at any given time on your machine, all of whose resources are torn down and rebuilt from scratch when needed? I use my current laptop both for work and personally, and in my personal workspaces alone, I have at least half a dozen browser windows with ~20 tabs representing research that I'm doing or a task that I'…

I cannot speak for the user you replied to, but to answer this question: > Do you only have a single thread of tasks you're doing at any given time on your machine, all of whose resources are torn down and rebuilt from scratch when needed? Yes, absolutely, at least when it comes to my web browser. I run Firefox Nightly and intentionally use its prompt to restart for an update as a prompt to consider whether I should…

I do the same. In a notes app, I have a TODO note where I save links and a few word description of what a link is. This gives me one place to maintain a reading list.

I also have notes for current projects/tasks. I have structure and search to find things.

As a life-hack to make better use of my time, I use the Freedom.io service to block all social media and “time wasting” sites so that I can only access them before work, first half hour of lunch time, and after end of work day. In practice what this means is that I scan HN and Twitter early each morning for tech stuff that is useful/interesting and add any useful links to my notes. Every few days I edit my notes to discard material.

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