21 ms·

TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

1400 points by thesephist 6y ago

jerjerjer 6y ago
Cool. I'd prefer the same info as a relational DB though.
dheera 6y ago
Sounds like a fantastic idea, especially if I can use it to save video and images from websites too. Unfortunately it doesn't work for me though -- I get "Unchecked runtime.lastError: Native host has exited." Output of install script: ``` $ ./install.sh chrome mnlmpigkagdnfjmicelbkejgfefcnlkp + [[ 2 -lt 1 ]] + [[ chrome == \f\i\r\e\f\o\x ]] + [[ chrome == \c\h\r\o\m\e ]] + [[ 2 -eq 2 ]] + [[ 32 -eq 32 ]] ++ uname -s + OS=Linux ++ echo chrome ++ tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' + BROWSER=chrome + case "$OS $BROWSER" in + MANIFEST_LOCATION=/home/dheera/.config/google-chrome/NativeMessagingHosts + mkdir -p /home/dheera/.config/google-chrome/NativeMessagingHosts + APP_NAME=com.rsnous.tabfs ++ pwd + EXE_PATH=/home/dheera/code/clone/TabFS/fs/tabfs + case "$BROWSER" in + EXTENSION_ID=mnlmpigkagdnfjmicelbkejgfefcnlkp ++ cat + MANIFEST='{ "name": "com.rsnous.tabfs", "description": "TabFS", "path": "/home/dheera/code/clone/TabFS/fs/tabfs", "type": "stdio", "allowed_extensions": ["tabfs@rsnous.com"], "allowed_origins": ["chrome-extension://mnlmpigkagdnfjmicelbkejgfefcnlkp/"] }' + echo '{ "name": "com.rsnous.tabfs", "description": "TabFS", "path": "/home/dheera/code/clone/TabFS/fs/tabfs", "type": "stdio", "allowed_extensions": ["tabfs@rsnous.com"], "allowed_origins": ["chrome-extension://mnlmpigkagdnfjmicelbkejgfefcnlkp/"] }' ```
- rasz 6y ago
  >save video Problem with HTML5 video is you can use more than just a link to video file https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/MediaSource https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/MediaSource There are "certain" websites serving videos using BLOB object mediasource created dynamically from encrypted https sources. So far I had no luck trying to capture resulting video datastream, mediasource is a write and forget type of interface, and on top of that MediaRecorder/captureStream() is bugged and crashes so you cant even record lossy reencoded capture. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50938089/how-to-download-or-get-as-a-blob-a-mediasource-used-for-streaming-html5-video https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50938089/how-to-download... I should probably experiment with shimming whole MediaSource api and capture data before its pumped into the read only void.
  - why_only_15 6y ago
    Another trick is to use mobile safari, because mobile safari only supports HLS, which is more easily downloadable.
- ianbicking 6y ago
  It's running a script in the background to exfiltrate the info from the browser to the system, and that script has an error. I believe it's a script like /home/dheera/code/clone/TabFS/fs/tabfs* – if you look around in the browser some more you should find the stderr output of the script, which probably explains the error
cocktailpeanuts 6y ago
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".
- Shared404 6y ago
  This does seem like a brilliant idea, doesn't it. I'm thinking about how difficult it would be to setup something like 'surf' but using chromium/firefox, and then driving it completely off the CLI. It honestly sounds like my dream browser.
- frob 6y ago
  You can kinda do that with the vimium plugin. Select a bunch of tabs and press "x", but it doesn't support visual selection of tabs.
- db48x 6y ago
  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.
  - drran 6y ago
    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.
    - db48x 6y ago
      I'm not sure an addon is necessary for that. Firefox automatically unloads any tab that hasn't been used in a while.
- 6y ago
Shared404 6y ago
I'm loving this trend to do more things with filesystems. There was https://amoffat.github.io/supertag/ https://amoffat.github.io/supertag/ [,] which I'm intending to use in my filesharing sftp server, and now this, which seems like something that exposes functionality from a web browser that I would love.
- curlinglion 6y ago
  Same here. I quite like some of the filesystem interfaces Linux provides (cgroups for example)
- pjmlp 6y ago
  KIO and GVfs wave hopeless to the crowd too busy replicating a UNIX V6 experience with a bit of Plan 9/Solaris influence.
  - anthk 6y ago
    Ironically this is reimplementing plan9/9fs and everything is a filesystem. If any, this is Unix++. Also, say hello to FUSE, which tries to mimic that on the userland.
Palomides 6y ago
I like it, the plan 9/acme approach seems like it could be pretty powerful with browsers
jwalton 6y ago
This is a cool idea. It would be nice to be able to blacklist some tabs though. For example, I wouldn’t want the text of my banks website easily readable by any random process.
- popc0rn 6y ago
  You could probably run your bank website in incognito mode and avoid extensions. I do this all the time because I don't completely trust any of my installed extensions. Even if I did, they are auto-updated and their code can change at any time without any notice.
  - herewulf 6y ago
    Good idea. You could also access your bank and other sensitive sites with a different profile: google-chrome --user-data-dir="/path/to/somewhere/else" I use this switch and a directory from `mktemp -d` for remote debugging (--remote-debugging-port=1234). The debugging does not disturb my normal browsing and the profile is completely disposable.
davidp670 6y ago
This reminds me of Bookmark OS https://bookmarkos.com https://bookmarkos.com
chx 6y ago
If you are running WSL1, https://github.com/billziss-gh/winfuse https://github.com/billziss-gh/winfuse is your friend.
Jarred 6y ago
A different kind of tab-based filesystem that would be nice: Expose all the resources used in each tab in a virtual filesystem (JS, CSS, images, HTML, fonts, etc) in a folder for each tab. Basically Chrome Developer Tool's Sources tab but as files and folders on your computer. This would be great for scraping with headless browsers. It'd let you use shell scripts or your favorite programming language's filesystem library to read/copy assets, rather than writing code with Puppeteer to copy files/data. It would have to copy from Chrome directly though, rather than re-fetch the content
- vosper 6y ago
  > Basically Chrome Developer Tool's Sources tab but as files and folders on your computer. Isn’t that what happens when you save a page? Or is that not possible with Puppeteer?
  - mbreese 6y ago
    I think they were thinking more along the lines of a live system. Where you could change the settings of the page in real time using the filesystem interface.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- cookiengineer 6y ago
  This sounds actually very similar to what I am building, if you ignore the Chrome part [1] :) The general idea is to have more persistent caching locally, so that peer offloading (and persistence of offline content) can be guaranteed. Since yesterday the cache supports multiple versions of each file (with a timestamp), and it will get a UI that allows to navigate back in time for each URL. [1] https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth
wutbrodo 6y ago
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 documentation and probably-necessary security model). I'm cautiously optimistic that this is going to represent a dramatic step function in ease-of-use of my OS, in the same way that i3 was. EDIT: I should clarify that I did read the author's note that this is experimental, not secure, etc. I'm mainly just excited about having a jumping-off point to play around with and possibly hack on a little.
- amdbcg 6y ago
  would you mind providing context /docs to some of your fixes and scripts so I can observe/install some of them?
  - wutbrodo 6y ago
    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.
deleted 6y ago
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Animats 6y ago
Next, a browser extension that shows your file system as browser tabs.
tjoff 6y ago
Love it, I didn't see and would love to see them also grouped by window, as that is how they naturally get grouped into different tasks (for me at least).
sho_hn 6y ago
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:// 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.
- viraptor 6y ago
  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.
  - pvorb 6y ago
    I think KDE still supports Konqueror, which implements things like this. It used to be KDE's file manager and web browser all in one app. I always found this to be quite logical. The underlying abstraction is called KIO. Unfortunately I have no KDE installation at hand, so I can't tell if dowloading all images of a webpage still works as easily. The Audio CD ripping feature should work without problems, though. Btw Konqueror also used/uses the KHTML rendering engine, which was the foundation for WebKit.
    - jle17 6y ago
      > It used to be KDE's file manager and web browser all in one app. It goes further than that. It's pretty much everything in one app. KIOs accesses stuff and KParts shows it. Since many applications expose their functionality using those, it can show whatever content they support and browse it as a filesystem when it's possible. Web browsing is just KIO doing http and a KPart showing the page. File management is just the file (or smb or sftp or whatever) KIO and the Dolphin KPart. The Kate KPart is used in both cases to either view local text files or web pages source. But there are others and you can do any combination, including some cool ones. You can go to man:// or info:// to view man/info pages. The Akonadi KIO from the PIM suite can be used to browse remote mail or calendar accounts and extract data. It even used to be possible to use magnet links in HTML (like in <video src="magnet:...">) with kio-magnet or to browse mysql databases and use applications to edit content in cells with libferris, although I don't think those are currently maintained.
22c 6y ago
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.
- loa_in_ 6y ago
  In this post someone mentioned brotab which does exactly that.
  - 22c 6y ago
    Thanks, I'll check it out!
TekMol 6y ago
What is the tool used in the example where they select files and then delete them? https://omar.website/tabfs/doc/delete.mp4 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.
- freetonik 6y ago
  You might like Ranger[1]. It's not dired, but has similar rich set of features. [1]: https://github.com/ranger/ranger https://github.com/ranger/ranger
- mgaw 6y ago
  There is also `vidir` which is part of `moreutils`: https://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/ https://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/
- unhammer 6y ago
  You could always emacs --eval '(dired ".")' to immediately start emacs-dired in this directory :-)
  - githubalphapapa 6y ago
    Also: $ cat ~/bin/dired #!/bin/bash # Launch Dired in a plain Emacs configuration. # Arguments are passed to Emacs, e.g. "-nw" works as expected. emacs -q "$@" \ --eval "(dired default-directory)" \ --eval "(defun kill-window-or-emacs () (interactive) (if (one-window-p) (kill-emacs) (delete-window)))" \ --eval "(setq dired-dwim-target t delete-by-moving-to-trash t)" \ --eval "(define-key dired-mode-map (kbd \"q\") #'kill-window-or-emacs)"
lilyball 6y ago
This is a really cool idea. Any chance of supporting Safari?
adamretter 6y ago
Absolutely brilliant. Thank you
blacklight 6y ago
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.
aljungberg 6y ago
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.
- bakoo 6y ago
  Cool idea, but I'd worry about all the malformed markup.
  - dotancohen 6y ago
    I'm finding malformed markup has not been a concern of mine for many years. It used to be bad, real bad, but now I cannot think of the last time that I had to deal with malformed markup while scraping.
  - cldellow 6y ago
    That's a good concern, but I think we can happily ignore it. The DOM represents the tree structure derived from the markup by the browser, so dealing with malformed markup wouldn't be the problem of this extension, it'd be the problem of the browser it's integrating in to.
- OOPMan 6y ago
  This is exactly the kind of dumb idea I expected to see on HN
nyanpasu64 6y ago
"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).
- rektide 6y ago
  /dev/disk and /dev/input both have a bunch of view subdirectories on my Debian box. the idea of a symlink itself suggests denormalization, suggests views, suggests relations, so perhaps we should try to loosen up our mental model of what a file-system is some? i upvoted because it's an interesting question, but to me i would like good patterns for how to express data & views on the file-system. data goes into databases to die, alas. it remains tragically single consumer, one database one application. not that it has to be, but that's how things usually are. the file system by contrast is exposed system wide, & requires no app configuration or discovery to consume data on it (I guess choosing a file might sort of count?). there are a wide range of command line and gui tools built in to the os for exploring & manipulating the file system. perhaps we could make a good sql on the file-system plugin, to make sql data more accessible across the system? :)
rhabarba 6y ago
Finally, I can simulate 9P on worse browsers.
dash2 6y ago
Slightly OT: I would really like an alt-tab command that cycled through my browser tabs as well as my app windows. Nowadays a single website is more like an app than the entire web browser is, so I think this metaphor would make sense.
- ALittleLight 6y ago
  ctrl and page up or down move forward and back across tabs in most browsers. ctrl (or alt) + number switches to that tab.
  - dash2 6y ago
    But I want something that integrates browser tabs and other ordinary app windows. A single command for everything.
popc0rn 6y ago
This is an awesome idea and great work! I didn't even know I needed this until now. Now I even feel like something similar should be a regular part of a web browser, just like web development tools :)
sub7 6y ago
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.
- samwhiteUK 6y ago
  > This is the best idea I've seen all year. Ba-dum tsshhh
- jmercouris 6y ago
  If you are serious about spending 25k, please contact me, we are working on the Nyxt browser. Email us at hello@atlas.engineer
  - b3n 6y ago
    How can I control the Nyxt browser with the file system?
  - runeks 6y ago
    IMHO an extension for existing browsers seems like a better idea than creating a new browser. Why did you choose the latter approach?
    - generalizations 6y ago
      Not involved, but it's nice to see alternative browsers that break the firefox/chrome duopoly.
    - herewulf 6y ago
      I'm not involved either, but after doing some reading it seems the project aims to create a completely customizable browsing interface for power users that would be impossible with extensions because of the limitations that Firefox/Chrome impose.
  - herewulf 6y ago
KitDuncan 6y ago
I'd be willing to back a patreon that explores this concept further. I'd be worried about browser updates breaking things though.
- jmercouris 6y ago
  If you are interested, we are thinking about exploring this concept in Nyxt, please voice your support on our GitHub (leave an issue or otherwise). https://github.com/atlas-engineer/nyxt https://github.com/atlas-engineer/nyxt
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
sfgweilr4f 6y ago
I didn't see any cookie or local storage management. Is that included?
mcdevilkiller 6y ago
Perfect example of "everything is a file", imo.
ellis0n 6y ago
TabFS is what I was looking for LiveComment. With a simple frontend and backend plugin for livecomment, you can manage your 800 tabs in one tab with iframe preview https://www.npmjs.com/package/livecomment https://www.npmjs.com/package/livecomment
dotancohen 6y ago
This is the type of tool that I would love to love. But experience tell me that any tool that interfaces with the browser will break in a year and a half. Depending on this tool will put me into a situation where I'll have to decide between preserving my workflow or updating my browser and possibly other software. Maybe once there's more than 5 forks or a few hundred Github stars, I'll start to see where I can incorporate it into my workflow. But as it is, I've become wary of super-useful tools that are not yet in widespread use.
bjornsing 6y ago
Interesting idea that could be applied to a lot of other things... You could imagine a unified /proc-like file system for a big hairy backend for instance.
arendtio 6y ago
Would be cool if it was compatible with Tree Style Tabs ;-) In fact, one feature I am missing in Tree Style Tabs is the ability to save a list of tabs as a text file to archive it and to open/import it at a later point in time again. Somehow TabFS feels like it could be used to achieve that.
- CDRdude 6y ago
  It seems to be compatible with tree style tabs. I'm not sure how to import, but this seems to do a reasonable job of exporting: ls | xargs -I {} paste {}/url.txt {}/title.txt
felixr 6y ago
I really like the idea and it made me realize that I want a simple interface to list/switch/create tabs from custom tools. However, I think a less powerful extension that just subscribes to `chrome.(tab|window).*` events and reports them to a local server and listens for commands (e.g to create tabs) would be enough. Not using the debug api and not exposing more than tabs, windows and URLs. The reporting bit of the extension could be as simple as a bunch of listeners a la: chrome.tabs.onSelectionChanged.addListener( (tabId, props) => fetch('http://localhost:8118/report?'+JSON.stringify([tabId, props])));
skovorodkin 6y ago
Probably not as powerful as TabFS, but there's also https://github.com/balta2ar/brotab https://github.com/balta2ar/brotab: > bt (brotab = Browser Tabs) is a command-line tool that helps you manage browser tabs. It can help you list, close, reorder, open and activate your tabs. It supports both Chrome and Firefox. I use it to get titles of tabs that make some sound in Firefox.
nicolewhite 6y ago
Neat! Your example of closing all Stack Overflow tabs reminds me of a little extension I made a while ago to manage tabs by domain: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/manage-tabs-by-domain/jgjhgpeaejjahlbcgijdibooomicdcfi https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/manage-tabs-by-dom... Which would allow you to easily close all tabs from Stack Overflow.
incanus77 6y ago
I’m excited to dig into this a bit and possibly add Safari support. I recently built a script (https://github.com/incanus/fari https://github.com/incanus/fari) for Curses-based (terminal) navigation of Safari tabs with hopes of adding management functionality in the future.
amelius 6y ago
I think the most useful extension of this would be to have any DOM node become a node in the filesystem.
selfishgene 6y ago
Fantastic idea! As someone who was just starting to slowly learn their way around the Chrome API, your timing couldn't be better either. Look forward to seeing what else gets implemented on your todo list.
nudpiedo 6y ago
It looks like a fancy way to create a reverse shell
bergstromm466 6y ago
This is why we should move to Holochain and DAT: it allows this + more.
brokenkebab 6y ago
Smart! Though, it would be nice to have full html besides txt.
antpls 6y ago
> more persistence stuff. as I said earlier, it would also be cool if you could put arbitrary files in the subtrees, so .git, Mac extended attrs, editor temp files, etc all work. make it able to behave like a 'real' filesystem. also as I said earlier, some weirdness in the fact that tabs are so disposable; they have a very different lifecycle from most parts of my real filesystem. how to nudge that? It would be interesting to have a "persistent" layer where you could store stuff related to a domain. For example you would store userscripts in "ycombinator.com" folder, and they would load each time a tab of that domain is open. That would be a clean organization. Then, if websites are made with TabFS in mind, the gap between the concepts of "apps" and "website" is probably filled.
javajosh 6y ago
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.
da39a3ee 6y ago
> (now... how would you do this without TabFS? I honestly have no idea, off the top of my head. like, how do you even get the titles of tabs? how do you tell the browser to close them?) chrome-cli
chmod775 6y ago
Just a heads up that this is a potential security vulnerability because it essentially allows sites to put arbitrary files into your file system. This might cause certain software to automatically read them (for instance to generate previews) and allow an attacker to exploit vulnerabilities in that software. Think of an unsandboxed process generating a preview for a PDF file...
- saagarjha 6y ago
  In an ideal system, that process would be sandboxed of course.
MisterTea 6y ago
Interesting use of a file server. On plan 9 we use a file server called webfs[1] which serves web pages as a series of directories containing files of parsed html and so on. It's basically a tabbed browser back end. A front end such as mothra or netsurf[2] can then use webfs to abstract the html protocol and replaces post/get with read()/write(). And it can be served over a network so you could run a webfs "server" and let multiple clients on multiple machines surf the web through a single webfs server. Bonus is you can also do webstuff from shell scripts so the back end is used by shell programs like hget which is the plan 9 equivalent to wget :-) 1. http://man.postnix.pw/9front/4/webfs http://man.postnix.pw/9front/4/webfs 2. https://github.com/netsurf-plan9 https://github.com/netsurf-plan9
abvr 6y ago
Slightly unrelated, but as a fan and user of Edge, I really miss their old 'Save tabs for later' feature.
oliv__ 6y ago
I haven't seen this included in the "what you can do with this" section but my first thought was that you could use git in there and save your usage over time.
twobitshifter 6y ago
If you have many tabs open, it’s good to schedule some time to put these into a bookmark manager, memex, org brain, tiddlywiki, or equivalent. I’ve found they’re open usually because the work on each tab is unfinished. I’ve got to read this, I want to remember this, or this could help me with a project, are the categories my tabs often fall into. An inbox zero approach to tabs is what I’m working towards.

1400 points by thesephist 6y ago

Cool. I'd prefer the same info as a relational DB though.

Sounds like a fantastic idea, especially if I can use it to save video and images from websites too. Unfortunately it doesn't work for me though -- I get "Unchecked runtime.lastError: Native host has exited." Output of install script: ``` $ ./install.sh chrome mnlmpigkagdnfjmicelbkejgfefcnlkp + [[ 2 -lt 1 ]] + [[ chrome == \f\i\r\e\f\o\x ]] + [[ chrome == \c\h\r\o\m\e ]] + [[ 2 -eq 2 ]] + [[ 32 -eq 32 ]] ++ uname -s + OS=Linux ++ echo chrome ++ tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' + BROWSER=chrome + case "$OS $BROWSER" in + MANIFEST_LOCATION=/home/dheera/.config/google-chrome/NativeMessagingHosts + mkdir -p /home/dheera/.config/google-chrome/NativeMessagingHosts + APP_NAME=com.rsnous.tabfs ++ pwd + EXE_PATH=/home/dheera/code/clone/TabFS/fs/tabfs + case "$BROWSER" in + EXTENSION_ID=mnlmpigkagdnfjmicelbkejgfefcnlkp ++ cat + MANIFEST='{ "name": "com.rsnous.tabfs", "description": "TabFS", "path": "/home/dheera/code/clone/TabFS/fs/tabfs", "type": "stdio", "allowed_extensions": ["tabfs@rsnous.com"], "allowed_origins": ["chrome-extension://mnlmpigkagdnfjmicelbkejgfefcnlkp/"] }' + echo '{ "name": "com.rsnous.tabfs", "description": "TabFS", "path": "/home/dheera/code/clone/TabFS/fs/tabfs", "type": "stdio", "allowed_extensions": ["tabfs@rsnous.com"], "allowed_origins": ["chrome-extension://mnlmpigkagdnfjmicelbkejgfefcnlkp/"] }' ```

rasz 6y ago
>save video Problem with HTML5 video is you can use more than just a link to video file https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/MediaSource https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/MediaSource There are "certain" websites serving videos using BLOB object mediasource created dynamically from encrypted https sources. So far I had no luck trying to capture resulting video datastream, mediasource is a write and forget type of interface, and on top of that MediaRecorder/captureStream() is bugged and crashes so you cant even record lossy reencoded capture. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50938089/how-to-download-or-get-as-a-blob-a-mediasource-used-for-streaming-html5-video https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50938089/how-to-download... I should probably experiment with shimming whole MediaSource api and capture data before its pumped into the read only void.
- why_only_15 6y ago
  Another trick is to use mobile safari, because mobile safari only supports HLS, which is more easily downloadable.
ianbicking 6y ago
It's running a script in the background to exfiltrate the info from the browser to the system, and that script has an error. I believe it's a script like /home/dheera/code/clone/TabFS/fs/tabfs* – if you look around in the browser some more you should find the stderr output of the script, which probably explains the error

cocktailpeanuts 6y ago

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".

Shared404 6y ago
This does seem like a brilliant idea, doesn't it. I'm thinking about how difficult it would be to setup something like 'surf' but using chromium/firefox, and then driving it completely off the CLI. It honestly sounds like my dream browser.
frob 6y ago
You can kinda do that with the vimium plugin. Select a bunch of tabs and press "x", but it doesn't support visual selection of tabs.
db48x 6y ago
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.
- drran 6y ago
  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.
  - db48x 6y ago
    I'm not sure an addon is necessary for that. Firefox automatically unloads any tab that hasn't been used in a while.
6y ago

Shared404 6y ago

I'm loving this trend to do more things with filesystems. There was https://amoffat.github.io/supertag/ https://amoffat.github.io/supertag/ [,] which I'm intending to use in my filesharing sftp server, and now this, which seems like something that exposes functionality from a web browser that I would love.

curlinglion 6y ago
Same here. I quite like some of the filesystem interfaces Linux provides (cgroups for example)
pjmlp 6y ago
KIO and GVfs wave hopeless to the crowd too busy replicating a UNIX V6 experience with a bit of Plan 9/Solaris influence.
- anthk 6y ago
  Ironically this is reimplementing plan9/9fs and everything is a filesystem. If any, this is Unix++. Also, say hello to FUSE, which tries to mimic that on the userland.

Palomides 6y ago

I like it, the plan 9/acme approach seems like it could be pretty powerful with browsers

jwalton 6y ago

This is a cool idea. It would be nice to be able to blacklist some tabs though. For example, I wouldn’t want the text of my banks website easily readable by any random process.

popc0rn 6y ago
You could probably run your bank website in incognito mode and avoid extensions. I do this all the time because I don't completely trust any of my installed extensions. Even if I did, they are auto-updated and their code can change at any time without any notice.
- herewulf 6y ago
  Good idea. You could also access your bank and other sensitive sites with a different profile: google-chrome --user-data-dir="/path/to/somewhere/else" I use this switch and a directory from `mktemp -d` for remote debugging (--remote-debugging-port=1234). The debugging does not disturb my normal browsing and the profile is completely disposable.

davidp670 6y ago

This reminds me of Bookmark OS https://bookmarkos.com https://bookmarkos.com

chx 6y ago

If you are running WSL1, https://github.com/billziss-gh/winfuse https://github.com/billziss-gh/winfuse is your friend.

Jarred 6y ago

A different kind of tab-based filesystem that would be nice: Expose all the resources used in each tab in a virtual filesystem (JS, CSS, images, HTML, fonts, etc) in a folder for each tab. Basically Chrome Developer Tool's Sources tab but as files and folders on your computer. This would be great for scraping with headless browsers. It'd let you use shell scripts or your favorite programming language's filesystem library to read/copy assets, rather than writing code with Puppeteer to copy files/data. It would have to copy from Chrome directly though, rather than re-fetch the content

vosper 6y ago
> Basically Chrome Developer Tool's Sources tab but as files and folders on your computer. Isn’t that what happens when you save a page? Or is that not possible with Puppeteer?
- mbreese 6y ago
  I think they were thinking more along the lines of a live system. Where you could change the settings of the page in real time using the filesystem interface.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
cookiengineer 6y ago
This sounds actually very similar to what I am building, if you ignore the Chrome part [1] :) The general idea is to have more persistent caching locally, so that peer offloading (and persistence of offline content) can be guaranteed. Since yesterday the cache supports multiple versions of each file (with a timestamp), and it will get a UI that allows to navigate back in time for each URL. [1] https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth

wutbrodo 6y ago

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 documentation and probably-necessary security model). I'm cautiously optimistic that this is going to represent a dramatic step function in ease-of-use of my OS, in the same way that i3 was. EDIT: I should clarify that I did read the author's note that this is experimental, not secure, etc. I'm mainly just excited about having a jumping-off point to play around with and possibly hack on a little.

amdbcg 6y ago
would you mind providing context /docs to some of your fixes and scripts so I can observe/install some of them?
- wutbrodo 6y ago
  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.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Animats 6y ago

Next, a browser extension that shows your file system as browser tabs.

tjoff 6y ago

Love it, I didn't see and would love to see them also grouped by window, as that is how they naturally get grouped into different tasks (for me at least).

sho_hn 6y ago

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:// 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.

viraptor 6y ago
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.
- pvorb 6y ago
  I think KDE still supports Konqueror, which implements things like this. It used to be KDE's file manager and web browser all in one app. I always found this to be quite logical. The underlying abstraction is called KIO. Unfortunately I have no KDE installation at hand, so I can't tell if dowloading all images of a webpage still works as easily. The Audio CD ripping feature should work without problems, though. Btw Konqueror also used/uses the KHTML rendering engine, which was the foundation for WebKit.
  - jle17 6y ago
    > It used to be KDE's file manager and web browser all in one app. It goes further than that. It's pretty much everything in one app. KIOs accesses stuff and KParts shows it. Since many applications expose their functionality using those, it can show whatever content they support and browse it as a filesystem when it's possible. Web browsing is just KIO doing http and a KPart showing the page. File management is just the file (or smb or sftp or whatever) KIO and the Dolphin KPart. The Kate KPart is used in both cases to either view local text files or web pages source. But there are others and you can do any combination, including some cool ones. You can go to man:// or info:// to view man/info pages. The Akonadi KIO from the PIM suite can be used to browse remote mail or calendar accounts and extract data. It even used to be possible to use magnet links in HTML (like in <video src="magnet:...">) with kio-magnet or to browse mysql databases and use applications to edit content in cells with libferris, although I don't think those are currently maintained.

22c 6y ago

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.

loa_in_ 6y ago
In this post someone mentioned brotab which does exactly that.
- 22c 6y ago
  Thanks, I'll check it out!

TekMol 6y ago

What is the tool used in the example where they select files and then delete them? https://omar.website/tabfs/doc/delete.mp4 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.

freetonik 6y ago
You might like Ranger[1]. It's not dired, but has similar rich set of features. [1]: https://github.com/ranger/ranger https://github.com/ranger/ranger
mgaw 6y ago
There is also `vidir` which is part of `moreutils`: https://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/ https://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/
unhammer 6y ago
You could always emacs --eval '(dired ".")' to immediately start emacs-dired in this directory :-)
- githubalphapapa 6y ago
  Also: $ cat ~/bin/dired #!/bin/bash # Launch Dired in a plain Emacs configuration. # Arguments are passed to Emacs, e.g. "-nw" works as expected. emacs -q "$@" \ --eval "(dired default-directory)" \ --eval "(defun kill-window-or-emacs () (interactive) (if (one-window-p) (kill-emacs) (delete-window)))" \ --eval "(setq dired-dwim-target t delete-by-moving-to-trash t)" \ --eval "(define-key dired-mode-map (kbd \"q\") #'kill-window-or-emacs)"

lilyball 6y ago

This is a really cool idea. Any chance of supporting Safari?

adamretter 6y ago

Absolutely brilliant. Thank you

blacklight 6y ago

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.

aljungberg 6y ago

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.

bakoo 6y ago
Cool idea, but I'd worry about all the malformed markup.
- dotancohen 6y ago
  I'm finding malformed markup has not been a concern of mine for many years. It used to be bad, real bad, but now I cannot think of the last time that I had to deal with malformed markup while scraping.
- cldellow 6y ago
  That's a good concern, but I think we can happily ignore it. The DOM represents the tree structure derived from the markup by the browser, so dealing with malformed markup wouldn't be the problem of this extension, it'd be the problem of the browser it's integrating in to.
OOPMan 6y ago
This is exactly the kind of dumb idea I expected to see on HN

nyanpasu64 6y ago

"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).

rektide 6y ago
/dev/disk and /dev/input both have a bunch of view subdirectories on my Debian box. the idea of a symlink itself suggests denormalization, suggests views, suggests relations, so perhaps we should try to loosen up our mental model of what a file-system is some? i upvoted because it's an interesting question, but to me i would like good patterns for how to express data & views on the file-system. data goes into databases to die, alas. it remains tragically single consumer, one database one application. not that it has to be, but that's how things usually are. the file system by contrast is exposed system wide, & requires no app configuration or discovery to consume data on it (I guess choosing a file might sort of count?). there are a wide range of command line and gui tools built in to the os for exploring & manipulating the file system. perhaps we could make a good sql on the file-system plugin, to make sql data more accessible across the system? :)

rhabarba 6y ago

Finally, I can simulate 9P on worse browsers.

dash2 6y ago

Slightly OT: I would really like an alt-tab command that cycled through my browser tabs as well as my app windows. Nowadays a single website is more like an app than the entire web browser is, so I think this metaphor would make sense.

ALittleLight 6y ago
ctrl and page up or down move forward and back across tabs in most browsers. ctrl (or alt) + number switches to that tab.
- dash2 6y ago
  But I want something that integrates browser tabs and other ordinary app windows. A single command for everything.

popc0rn 6y ago

This is an awesome idea and great work! I didn't even know I needed this until now. Now I even feel like something similar should be a regular part of a web browser, just like web development tools :)

sub7 6y ago

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.

samwhiteUK 6y ago
> This is the best idea I've seen all year. Ba-dum tsshhh
jmercouris 6y ago
If you are serious about spending 25k, please contact me, we are working on the Nyxt browser. Email us at hello@atlas.engineer
- b3n 6y ago
  How can I control the Nyxt browser with the file system?
- runeks 6y ago
  IMHO an extension for existing browsers seems like a better idea than creating a new browser. Why did you choose the latter approach?
  - generalizations 6y ago
    Not involved, but it's nice to see alternative browsers that break the firefox/chrome duopoly.
  - herewulf 6y ago
    I'm not involved either, but after doing some reading it seems the project aims to create a completely customizable browsing interface for power users that would be impossible with extensions because of the limitations that Firefox/Chrome impose.
- herewulf 6y ago

KitDuncan 6y ago

I'd be willing to back a patreon that explores this concept further. I'd be worried about browser updates breaking things though.

jmercouris 6y ago
If you are interested, we are thinking about exploring this concept in Nyxt, please voice your support on our GitHub (leave an issue or otherwise). https://github.com/atlas-engineer/nyxt https://github.com/atlas-engineer/nyxt

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

sfgweilr4f 6y ago

I didn't see any cookie or local storage management. Is that included?

mcdevilkiller 6y ago

Perfect example of "everything is a file", imo.

ellis0n 6y ago

TabFS is what I was looking for LiveComment. With a simple frontend and backend plugin for livecomment, you can manage your 800 tabs in one tab with iframe preview https://www.npmjs.com/package/livecomment https://www.npmjs.com/package/livecomment

dotancohen 6y ago

This is the type of tool that I would love to love. But experience tell me that any tool that interfaces with the browser will break in a year and a half. Depending on this tool will put me into a situation where I'll have to decide between preserving my workflow or updating my browser and possibly other software. Maybe once there's more than 5 forks or a few hundred Github stars, I'll start to see where I can incorporate it into my workflow. But as it is, I've become wary of super-useful tools that are not yet in widespread use.

bjornsing 6y ago

Interesting idea that could be applied to a lot of other things... You could imagine a unified /proc-like file system for a big hairy backend for instance.

arendtio 6y ago

Would be cool if it was compatible with Tree Style Tabs ;-) In fact, one feature I am missing in Tree Style Tabs is the ability to save a list of tabs as a text file to archive it and to open/import it at a later point in time again. Somehow TabFS feels like it could be used to achieve that.

CDRdude 6y ago
It seems to be compatible with tree style tabs. I'm not sure how to import, but this seems to do a reasonable job of exporting: ls | xargs -I {} paste {}/url.txt {}/title.txt

felixr 6y ago

I really like the idea and it made me realize that I want a simple interface to list/switch/create tabs from custom tools. However, I think a less powerful extension that just subscribes to `chrome.(tab|window).*` events and reports them to a local server and listens for commands (e.g to create tabs) would be enough. Not using the debug api and not exposing more than tabs, windows and URLs. The reporting bit of the extension could be as simple as a bunch of listeners a la: chrome.tabs.onSelectionChanged.addListener( (tabId, props) => fetch('http://localhost:8118/report?'+JSON.stringify([tabId, props])));

skovorodkin 6y ago

Probably not as powerful as TabFS, but there's also https://github.com/balta2ar/brotab https://github.com/balta2ar/brotab: > bt (brotab = Browser Tabs) is a command-line tool that helps you manage browser tabs. It can help you list, close, reorder, open and activate your tabs. It supports both Chrome and Firefox. I use it to get titles of tabs that make some sound in Firefox.

nicolewhite 6y ago

Neat! Your example of closing all Stack Overflow tabs reminds me of a little extension I made a while ago to manage tabs by domain: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/manage-tabs-by-domain/jgjhgpeaejjahlbcgijdibooomicdcfi https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/manage-tabs-by-dom... Which would allow you to easily close all tabs from Stack Overflow.

incanus77 6y ago

I’m excited to dig into this a bit and possibly add Safari support. I recently built a script (https://github.com/incanus/fari https://github.com/incanus/fari) for Curses-based (terminal) navigation of Safari tabs with hopes of adding management functionality in the future.

amelius 6y ago

I think the most useful extension of this would be to have any DOM node become a node in the filesystem.

selfishgene 6y ago

Fantastic idea! As someone who was just starting to slowly learn their way around the Chrome API, your timing couldn't be better either. Look forward to seeing what else gets implemented on your todo list.

nudpiedo 6y ago

It looks like a fancy way to create a reverse shell

bergstromm466 6y ago

This is why we should move to Holochain and DAT: it allows this + more.

brokenkebab 6y ago

Smart! Though, it would be nice to have full html besides txt.

antpls 6y ago

> more persistence stuff. as I said earlier, it would also be cool if you could put arbitrary files in the subtrees, so .git, Mac extended attrs, editor temp files, etc all work. make it able to behave like a 'real' filesystem. also as I said earlier, some weirdness in the fact that tabs are so disposable; they have a very different lifecycle from most parts of my real filesystem. how to nudge that? It would be interesting to have a "persistent" layer where you could store stuff related to a domain. For example you would store userscripts in "ycombinator.com" folder, and they would load each time a tab of that domain is open. That would be a clean organization. Then, if websites are made with TabFS in mind, the gap between the concepts of "apps" and "website" is probably filled.

javajosh 6y ago

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.

da39a3ee 6y ago

> (now... how would you do this without TabFS? I honestly have no idea, off the top of my head. like, how do you even get the titles of tabs? how do you tell the browser to close them?) chrome-cli

chmod775 6y ago

Just a heads up that this is a potential security vulnerability because it essentially allows sites to put arbitrary files into your file system. This might cause certain software to automatically read them (for instance to generate previews) and allow an attacker to exploit vulnerabilities in that software. Think of an unsandboxed process generating a preview for a PDF file...

saagarjha 6y ago
In an ideal system, that process would be sandboxed of course.

MisterTea 6y ago

Interesting use of a file server. On plan 9 we use a file server called webfs[1] which serves web pages as a series of directories containing files of parsed html and so on. It's basically a tabbed browser back end. A front end such as mothra or netsurf[2] can then use webfs to abstract the html protocol and replaces post/get with read()/write(). And it can be served over a network so you could run a webfs "server" and let multiple clients on multiple machines surf the web through a single webfs server. Bonus is you can also do webstuff from shell scripts so the back end is used by shell programs like hget which is the plan 9 equivalent to wget :-) 1. http://man.postnix.pw/9front/4/webfs http://man.postnix.pw/9front/4/webfs 2. https://github.com/netsurf-plan9 https://github.com/netsurf-plan9

abvr 6y ago

Slightly unrelated, but as a fan and user of Edge, I really miss their old 'Save tabs for later' feature.

oliv__ 6y ago

I haven't seen this included in the "what you can do with this" section but my first thought was that you could use git in there and save your usage over time.

twobitshifter 6y ago

If you have many tabs open, it’s good to schedule some time to put these into a bookmark manager, memex, org brain, tiddlywiki, or equivalent. I’ve found they’re open usually because the work on each tab is unfinished. I’ve got to read this, I want to remember this, or this could help me with a project, are the categories my tabs often fall into. An inbox zero approach to tabs is what I’m working towards.