Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

omar.website

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 242 posts

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#71

Post by tveyben »

blackrock wrote: post #51
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?

I open a new window to research a specific topic. Then I open up all the links on sub tabs. This encloses all my research for this subject in one window. Often times I have upwards of 10+ windows opened. Since some of the work spans over several days or weeks. I also take screenshots of relevant information. Which gets automatically labeled by date and time into a screenshot folder, and sub-sorted into months.

This is where I miss to be able to name each group-of-tabs (the window) with a name so I can manage (eg when alt-tab’ing) quickly.

So window ‘topic-1’ have 10 tabs relating to ‘topic-1’ and the property ‘topic-1’ is visible in my WM.

Is this possible (I have not -yet - searched ‘enough’ for this functionality...)?

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#72

Post by benedikt »

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'…

> well-managed environment (ie one that has non-rudimentary window management and a browser/extension that handles idle tabs with negligible ongoing resource use).

Can you elaborate on this? Which extensions are you talking about?

I also rack up hundreds of tabs and my browser is often the main resource hog for me. I’ll often have to kill -9 it to force it to start with “oops we crashed, here are your previous tabs in an unloaded state”, but it sounds like you have a better way of doing this

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#73

Post by samb1729 »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #69
samb1729 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

On the topic of blocking distractions, I've found that creating a separate user account for focus time helps quite a bit, since it's sufficiently annoying to remove that particular barrier. Choosing not to configure a keyboard shortcut for account switching was a good call, too.

I tried using multiple Little Snitch profiles or different browsers on the same user account in the past but switching between them is way too low effort for my easily distracted brain. Getting back into distraction mode can be performed on autopilot in those cases.

That little delay in waiting for my watch to unlock my user account is just long enough to make me stop and think, and the vibration is like a gentle slap on the wrist.

My focus account has a single Little Snitch profile configured to block the time-vampires I know I'm susceptible to, along with Firefox configured to clear history on close. I don't need to be reminded Twitter exists just because I opened my browser and pressed T, they should at least have to pay for the privilege of advertising to my brain!

In general I think that taking full advantage of computers to make absolutely everything instantly accessible is in many ways actively harmful to many types of brains. We live in an economy and too many of us just give that stuff away.

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#74

Post by blacklight »

I don't get why it requires to be loaded as a temporary extension in order to work. Both Chrome and Firefox nowadays only allow permanent installation for extensions that are present on the store.

I know that both the Mozilla and Chrome stores have become increasingly strict in terms of what the uploaded extensions can do (I've gone through a quite bumpy road to get my extension published), but if you submit the extension to them and make sure that it is compliant with their policies I think that there would be no need to manually load the manifest from developer mode.

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#75

Post by noisy_boy »

tveyben wrote: post #71
blackrock wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I open a new window to research a specific topic. Then I open up all the links on sub tabs. This encloses all my research for this subject in one window. Often times I have upwards of 10+ windows opened. Since some of the work spans over several days or weeks. I also take screenshots of relevant information. Which gets automatically labeled by date and time into a screenshot folder, and sub-sorted into months.

This is where I miss to be able to name each group-of-tabs (the window) with a name so I can manage (eg when alt-tab’ing) quickly. So window ‘topic-1’ have 10 tabs relating to ‘topic-1’ and the property ‘topic-1’ is visible in my WM. Is this possible (I have not -yet - searched ‘enough’ for this functionality...)?

I use Window Titler[0] for this because I use the same workflow of opening a new window for each "topic".

[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/window-titler...

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#76

Post by noisy_boy »

blackrock wrote: post #51
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?

I open a new window to research a specific topic. Then I open up all the links on sub tabs. This encloses all my research for this subject in one window. Often times I have upwards of 10+ windows opened. Since some of the work spans over several days or weeks. I also take screenshots of relevant information. Which gets automatically labeled by date and time into a screenshot folder, and sub-sorted into months.

This is exactly how I "partition" my work; makes closing logically related tabs super simple too - just close the window related to the "topic".

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#77

Post by aljungberg »

It would be cool if the DOM was exposed. Then you could write one liner bash scripts to do simple tasks like “download all images” or “delete script tags referencing spammyads.js”, all with nothing more advanced than find, cp, rm and mv in the shell. E.g.

cp html/body/*/img/.hero-img/hello.png ~Downloads/

You would need some clever way to express the DOM with ids and classes etc but it could be done with some subdirectory structure and long names, sometimes having multiple names for the same thing.

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#78

Post by drran »

db48x wrote: post #8
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".

If you just want to close all tabs then in Firefox right click a tab and select "Close Other Tabs". Also, you can control-click on tabs to apply commands the the whole set, such as closing them, sending them to your phone, etc.

In Firefox, you can click at tab bar and select "Select all tabs", then bookmark them all, then close them all.

Also, "Auto discard tab" plugin does a good job by keeping unused tabs closed, to save resources.

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#79

Post by nyanpasu64 »

"mnt/tabs/by-id/*/title.txt" asks your shell to expand a wildcard match, generating a list of files holding the title of each tab. If I were to feed it into a command-line app, I might start running into command length limits.

Would it work better as a "relational database" than a hierarchical tree filesystem? I noticced that "by-id" and "by-title" and "last-focused" are several views into an underlying source of data, and changing one view causes other branches of the filesystem to change automatically. Maybe it could be more cleanly modeled as a relational data store with one row per tab, and columns with different meanings. Then use SQL, or a cleaner notation for relational algebra, to query this interface.

The downside is that you can no longer use command-line utilities that operate on files (find/grep, fd/rg).

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#80

Post by cpach »

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 wonder if they were inspired by BeOS.

These days many desktop interfaces feel quite dumbed-down. Still very usable though. But perhaps sometimes with unrealized potential.

Post reply on HN