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Overcoming Tab Overload

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Re: Overcoming Tab Overload

#201

Post by odddog309 »

imilk wrote: post #36
dole wrote: post #11

I love OneTab, being able to dump 50-100 tabs out to a running page of links to restart the browser is simple peace of mind to me.

I love Onetab as well. The problem I often have is sending a lot of tabs to Onetab, then never looking at them again. Which may not actually be a problem and more of an indication for how "important" the tab actually was. The dream for me would be if Onetab has a search feature that allowed you to search the text on all the tabbed pages that you saved. Because sometimes you save a tab because of a specific topic, but…

if you are using firefox you can use https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-stash/

Re: Overcoming Tab Overload

#202

Post by joseluis »

tgbugs wrote: post #172
amadeuspagel wrote: post #66

My main problem with tabs is that they function as an additional window manager, meaning I'm constantly using two window managers at the same time, and getting confused between them. For example, I can use Ctrl+Tab to cycle through browser tabs and Alt+Tab to cycle through windows. I can't use either to cycle through everything I have open.

It is actually worse than that. Many/most implementations of tabs are completely opaque to the window manager so if you want to programmatically control your browser windows e.g. by moving a window with a certain title to the front you can't do it for windows that contain a certain tab unless it is the active tab. Oops.

I use the window-titler extension exactly for that. it precedes the window title with your custom one between brackets and you can filter processes from the command line to find the window you want... I made a script with wmctrl to bring windows to the front like this.

Re: Overcoming Tab Overload

#203

Post by mrobot »

jlokier wrote: post #171
crazygringo wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is what you're describing any different from just bookmarking all the tabs in a window to a new folder and closing the window? That's what I do. And then just open the whole folder as tabs in a new window when I go back to something. Then the advantage is that I can give the folder a name, a date, tags, nest it under a grouping of folders, etc. Plus I can back up bookmarks which gives me huge peace of mind. I've been…

There are many differences. First, if you "open the whole folder", you have to wait for a few hundred tabs to open for a large project, a few tens for a small project. That's very slow and uses a lot of memory. They don't open quickly in the asleep state the same was as tab sessions do. Then there is the maintenance of the folder. If you bookmark all tabs in a window to a folder, later you'll open the whole folder, d…

Thank you for the brain dump. I liked that this came up. I used tree style tabs for a few years starting way back in maybe 2012, but eventually just abandoned it because of the same performance problems you mentioned. I didn't replace it with anything good, and was just recently getting annoyed at the state of things as i suddenly find myself context switching a lot on mini projects. I was just setting myself up in Emacs org mode and felt i needed better integration with the browser. I have a little extra time to put into making it right. I think at the very least i am going to write some small amount of integration for the currently clocked Emacs org task, the main OS views, and Firefox, just Mac OS X to start, all open source.

Anyway, i was exploring options and i was glad to find your experience. I think i am ultimately looking for something similar to what you want and maybe will email you at some point to ask about this if i do indeed get a little deeper into it if you don't mind.

Re: Overcoming Tab Overload

#204

Post by shakow »

Grouping tabs by topic to read them later and from other browsers was one of the main problem I wanted to address in my workflow.

My current solution is to having developed a webextension + server system (https://github.com/domovikapp/domovik-server/) where I can stash any tab in a TOREAD list, and those replace my blank new tab page. Crude, but it does the job for me.

Re: Overcoming Tab Overload

#205

Post by joseluis »

jlokier wrote: post #171
crazygringo wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is what you're describing any different from just bookmarking all the tabs in a window to a new folder and closing the window? That's what I do. And then just open the whole folder as tabs in a new window when I go back to something. Then the advantage is that I can give the folder a name, a date, tags, nest it under a grouping of folders, etc. Plus I can back up bookmarks which gives me huge peace of mind. I've been…

There are many differences. First, if you "open the whole folder", you have to wait for a few hundred tabs to open for a large project, a few tens for a small project. That's very slow and uses a lot of memory. They don't open quickly in the asleep state the same was as tab sessions do. Then there is the maintenance of the folder. If you bookmark all tabs in a window to a folder, later you'll open the whole folder, d…

I'm in a very similar situation as you are regarding my browser usage and needs. I now have 46 windows open and 2.1K tabs open, but I've had at some point almost 70 windows and more than 7K tabs...

The most useful extensions I've found to manage this complexity are https://github.com/tpamula/webextension-window-titler and https://github.com/l10nelw/winger.

This is the script I made to bring up the firefox window I desire from the custom name I gave it using window-titler:

    #!/usr/bin/env bash
    #
    # switches to the firefox window that starts with the provided word between brackets
    
    NAME=$1
    
    WIN=$(wmctrl -l | grep Firefox | grep "\[${NAME}")
    if [[ -z $WIN ]]; then
        echo "no window found"
        exit
    fi
    
    NUM_WINS=$(echo "$WIN" | wc -l)
    if [[ $NUM_WINS -ne "1" ]]; then
        echo -e "$NUM_WINS windows found, please be more specific:\n"
        for w in "$WIN"; do
            echo "$w" | cut -d' ' -f4-
        done
        exit
    fi
    
    WIN_NAME=$(echo $WIN | cut -d' ' -f4-)
    WIN_ID=$(echo $WIN | cut -d' ' -f1)
    
    echo opening: $WIN_NAME
    wmctrl -iR $WIN_ID
And winger allows me to stash not-currently-needed windows in bookmarks, and restore them later...

This is a less than perfect system, but it's good enough for me for now.

Re: Overcoming Tab Overload

#206

Post by VMtest »

I think somehow I have overcome this tab overloadding problem on my own

I have restricted myself from browsing internet on mobile phone, so I only view them from my personal computer

I always keep a note on what I browse, regardless of how important or useless it is (except entertainment stuff to some extent)

I am using this note taking method to all my work as well, for example, searching online about security aspect of several CI/CD pipeline tools that my company use

The notes that I create are all mostly markdown files, with names to their own, so I can grep or find whenever I want, and encrypt and archive the whole folder as I want to back them up

By note taking down the links that I have viewed, sometimes with some wordings for explanation, I can keep track most of them, not all, becacuse sometimes I use namings that I couldn't recall and that's totally fine, I can still grep/find as I want anyway

I would just put down some file names so you guys can get a better idea

1. 3d-printing.md

2. asm.md

3. algorithms.md

4. browser.md

5. cybersecurity.md

6. hacking.md

7. graphics.md

8. gamedev0.md

9. reverse-engineering.md

10. storage-hard-drive.md

11. vpn-proxy.md

12. video-hardware-acceleration.md

13. game-engine.md

14. freelance-startups-business-side-hustle.md

15. fuchsia.md

16. electrical-and-computer-engineering.md

17. electronics.md

and a lot more like

300. linux/doc/linux-kernel.md

301. android/doc/android-apps.md

302. macos/doc/macos.md

303. windows/doc/windows-install.md

Edit: if you are wondering why do this at all when everything is just one google search away, well, i guess that's the whole point

Re: Overcoming Tab Overload

#208

Post by MaxBarraclough »

fabrice_d wrote: post #101
crazygringo wrote: post #82

I just wish there were a way to save page state along with a bookmark or similar. Sometimes I'd really like to close a ton of tabs, or just close my browser, or a whole window, and reopen tomorrow. But I'm relying on scroll position to know where I am in 20 different documents, or login credentials that only last for 24 hours, or certain comment threads that have been expanded while others have been collapsed, or my…

This is (bugs withstanding) what Firefox does if you choose to"Restore previous session" int the General/Startup section of about:preferences . This feature is provided by a Gecko component called the the session store ( https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/toolkit/compone... ).

Would be great if the bookmark all tabs feature could capture state in that way.

Re: Overcoming Tab Overload

#209

Post by Dyac »

catchmeifyoucan wrote: post #115
crazygringo wrote: post #82

I just wish there were a way to save page state along with a bookmark or similar. Sometimes I'd really like to close a ton of tabs, or just close my browser, or a whole window, and reopen tomorrow. But I'm relying on scroll position to know where I am in 20 different documents, or login credentials that only last for 24 hours, or certain comment threads that have been expanded while others have been collapsed, or my…

Hi. I may have something for ya. I'm building Amna ( https://getamna.com ) which manages tabs with tasks. Amna can do this (kind of). If you don't explicitly "close" a a browser window within Amna, it will just minimize the window. So it preserves the state (e.g scroll), while still giving you freedom to work on something else with a clean slate. It's not perfect, since the tabs aren't really closed, they'd be just o…

Is it possible to import tasks from other systems? Across my business we already use asana, trello, Jira and Monday, and there's also Google tasks in Gmail. Right now I use tacoapp to bring them all into one screen, literally just the title and link to the task.

Can you do something similar?

Re: Overcoming Tab Overload

#210

Post by felipeerias »

jzoch wrote: post #18

Tree style tabs on the side of my window absolutely changed my computing life. I stopped seeing tabs as a collection of what Im doing and instead started using them + the browsers inclination to save my tabs across restarts to track everything. Ill have a tree of tabs for blogs im reading, a tree for work stuff, a tree for amazon orders, etc. All that context can be closed in a single click. Ill have hundreds of tabs…

The most interesting feature of tree-style tabs is that they build a detailed information structure implicitly, as a side effect of browsing actions that you would do anyway. I think that is the right approach for any attempt to improve browser UIs.
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