TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem • Hacker News Board

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#161

Post by wutbrodo » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 1:37 AM UTC

amdbcg wrote: post #47

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?

I wrote a long response to this but accidentally refreshed my tab, so you're getting an abbreviated response = /

I can give you one of my favorite examples. I have a pretty intense job, and I've struggled to some degree with the way stress eats into both my work productivity and my well-being after work. I wrote this script to mitigate the bouts of workday akrasia that induce me to almost-unconsciously procrastinate, as well as the unfortunate habit of checking work email/Slack after work hours or while on breaks (one of the pitfalls of not physically separating my work and recreational machines).

I use a simple launcher app called gmrun, which allows defining custom protocol prefixes. I've defined a few of these protocols, but my favorite is "m:", which switches "modes" on my laptop. Appending a prefix-string of either "work", "rec", or "all" rewrites my i3 config file to switch to the corresponding "mode" by selectively disabling a set of switch-to-workspace keybindings. It's about 100 lines of straightforward Python code incl docs and newlines, took me half an hour, and it paid for the time I put into it in less than a week. Probably a _dozen_ times a day, I catch myself trying to switch to the workspace that has my messenger apps or personal browser windows, and disabling the keybinding is enough to short-circuit the stress-driven impulse to distract and procrastinate and remember that I am trying to do focused work. It works very similarly for checking my email/Slack after work hours, something I almost never do now for the same reasons.

This is pretty tuned to my situation, OS setup, and personality, but that's pretty much the point: I'm extremely spoiled by Linux, i3, etc due to having a system that's been custom-fitted to my every need every moment of my computing life since late high school. If there's a rough edge, I sand it; if there's an optimization opportunity, I take it (if the ROI seems clearly worth it).

Not to get on my soapbox, but it saddens me a little that so many people I talk to, particularly technical ones, have become disconnected from just how many affordances general-purpose computers can offer without ever being _forced_ to avoid choosing the ease of a one-size-fits-all approach.

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#162

Post by wutbrodo » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 1:40 AM UTC

benedikt wrote: post #72

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'…

> 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 i…

I currently use the Great Suspender on Chrome, which will suspend a tab that's been open for a while. The suspended tab just shows a Great Suspender icon, so it takes up ~0 RAM. I've whitelisted certain domains and sites (eg Messenger apps).

I know there are a ton of extensions aimed at this problem, including OneTab (which will collapse many tabs into a single page of links), but TGS works the best for my workflow.

I also use Session Buddy to periodically backup my current window/tab state, which I find more reliable and powerful than the default tab-restore functionality.

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#163

Post by wutbrodo » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 1:47 AM UTC

iam-TJ wrote: post #61

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'…

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 busi…

> 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

I will take a look, thank you! Would you mind briefly elaborating on what you found suboptimal about the workspace/window/tab hierarchy for organizing your tasks? So far it's working very well for me, and the low friction is a really important part of it. Though it's completely possible that I have blind spots around my pain points, or am about to run into a wall. Thanks in advance for your thoughts?

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#164

Post by javajosh » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 2:03 AM UTC

As an aside, nice vanity URL. I find myself having a Patrick Bateman-esque moment of business-card envy, but for URLs. That domain is just so...good. .com too often implies a business, .org a non-profit, etc but .website is just saying it is a website, not necessarily for anyone or anything (although presumably created by someone). Sadly someone is squatting josh.website or I would own it right now.

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#165

Post by wutbrodo » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 2:11 AM UTC

edrobap wrote: post #36

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 have seen this behaviour repeatedly. Having to many “task windows” makes it difficult to focus. Similar to having to many tasks in Asana or emails in my Inbox. Prioritisation is the only option to come out of this. Unfortunately, I haven’t found a way to tag priority with the “task windows”. And that’s the reason I daily browse through all windows and close the ones that are not urgent.

Hm, I haven't found this to be the case. This is probably in part because of my WM/OS setup; I use a tiling window manager and different workspaces for different contexts, so my fan-out factor is never that high in cases where it matters.

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#166

Post by javajosh » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 2:28 AM UTC

wutbrodo wrote: post #161

amdbcg wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I wrote a long response to this but accidentally refreshed my tab, so you're getting an abbreviated response = / I can give you one of my favorite examples. I have a pretty intense job, and I've struggled to some degree with the way stress eats into both my work productivity and my well-being after work. I wrote this script to mitigate the bouts of workday akrasia that induce me to almost-unconsciously procrastinate,…

Hey, thanks so much for introducing me to the term "akrasia" because it works perfectly to describe a phenomena that happens to me as well. And my solution is similar, if admittedly much lower tech (I comment/uncomment lines of my etc/hosts file to switch modes).

But it was the rest of your post, describing the way in which you're environment has morphed with you over the years, and how you've been able to really dial in your computing experience...it's so striking! There are few people who can say the same. I certainly cannot. I have personally gone through perhaps 3 complete redos in my adult life. But it's disruptive and bad, and I have to admit I feel some envy that you've been able to maintain a single coherent thread of evolution for so long. You must move around incredibly smoothly - I'd be curious to see a video of a few cycles of a build-test-debug cycle with your setup. I would also be curious to know how your file-system is organized. That seems to be the most difficult problem of all!

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#167

Post by skulk » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 2:43 AM UTC

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…

I use qutebrowser in one-window-per-tab mode and EXWM[1] as my window manager (with ivy for switching buffers). It still needs some more integration but currently is my favorite solution to this problem.

[1]: https://github.com/ch11ng/exwm

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#168

Post by jsrcout » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 3:05 AM UTC

weaksauce wrote: post #148

m463 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep a few tabs open, and close the browser regularly. A friend of mine keeps basically infinity tabs open. I sort of rolled my eyes, but accepted his rare behavior. However as time has gone on, I've been surprised to find I may have the rare behavior and it is common for people to work this way. So.. maybe this is a way he can backup his "filesystem" and not suffer a nervous breakdown when his machine reboots or s…

I am like your friend... basically tabs are a "working memory" that you don't want to store permanently in bookmarks. each window or sets of windows is typically a different topic that is being research on with a bunch of middle clicks to open tabs. I have so many open that I wrote a small webext for it that shows a page of all your tabs that you can click on to navigate to that tab with a click. just a nicer interfa…

This is the extension I didn't know I needed, thank you!

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#169

Post by b3n » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 3:24 AM UTC

jmercouris wrote: post #157

sub7 wrote: post #86

This is the best idea I've seen all year. You can make it so that every website is fully searchable and the data easily viewable/extractable. Set up the marketplace for user created plugins, the possibilities are endless. I would happily contribute $25k to this. reply if interested.

If you are serious about spending 25k, please contact me, we are working on the Nyxt browser. Email us at hello@atlas.engineer

How can I control the Nyxt browser with the file system?

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#170

Post by iam-TJ » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 3:41 AM UTC

wutbrodo wrote: post #163

iam-TJ wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 busi…

> 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 I will take a look, thank you! Would you mind briefly elaborating on what you found suboptimal about the workspace/window/tab hierarchy for organizing your tasks? So far it's working very well for me, and the low friction is a really important part…

My issues with tabs, even with extensions that organise them:

  * sheer mental challenge of quickly relocating related tabs and the context for why they were kept and relationships between them

  * inability to easily add WIP notes and commentary

  * difficulty of sharing tabs and context with others

  * possibility of losing them if power lost unexpectedly (during extended suspend for example) or accidentally close a single window instead of doing File > Quit

  * moving between different devices and different browsers

  * efficiency; affect on the browser and system of keeping tabs open for long periods of time (without quitting browser)

I don't use workspaces for the same reason I don't like tabbing between applications on the same monitor. I use multiple monitors so I only need to move my eyes to switch focus.