4 ms·

I have said this elsewhere, but the fact that so browsers have cashed in on tabs and that tabs are opaque to window managers means that you literally cannot sea

by tgbugs 5y ago

I have said this elsewhere, but the fact that so browsers have cashed in on tabs and that tabs are opaque to window managers means that you literally cannot search through your tabs to find one that is already open with the title or content that you want. This is something that technology can trivially and efficiently solve, yet it does not. I wrote my own bash summon/banish script to pull existing windows whose titles match a pattern and send them away. It is better at dealing with 20+ browser windows and 500+ tabs than anything that the UI teams at billion dollar companies seem to have come up with in literally my entire lifetime. This tells me that whatever the UI teams are doing it is a joke, because I have no idea what I am doing and it is working better. I still can't summon windows based on a search of their contents, but I'm sure I can solve that for at least some Emacs buffers. The thing that is stupid is that opening a new window and typing in a url is usually faster than finding the already open version of that same window (which has the old state). Browsers can sort of do this with tabs, but why the heck isn't there a single box that will take you to the information that you were already viewing locally? The user interaction workflows for managing large amounts of information are fundamentally broken. The UX for funnelling users into parting with their dollars and data are flawless, but somehow it is impossible to take me to the window I already had opened on the subject faster than it is for me to open it again from scratch? That is a sad, sad commentary on the dystopian nightmare that we are trapped in.

samename 5y ago
Firefox lets you go to a tab that’s already open by entering the title or url.
- Vinnl 5y ago
  You can also search for tabs if you type a % in the address bar or via a menu entry: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/search-open-tabs-firefox https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/search-open-tabs-firefo...
quirkot 5y ago
I say this with all the love and compassion in my heart: have you tried bookmarks? Not trying to be snide, but having that many tabs open and expecting to ever come back to the same one twice is 100% incomprehensible to me. But, I freely admit, I start trying to pare down when my tabs get narrower than the default width. I've gathered that I'm an anomaly
- tgbugs 5y ago
  I hear you. I do use bookmarks, and sometimes they work better than a google search, but they are a solution to a different problem (a problem for which sometimes I wonder whether it doesn't make sense to store the raw html of every page I ever visit and stick it in a full text search index ... org capture maybe?), and they are siloed inside their specific apps or websites. I got burned by using reddit's save functionality without realizing that you can only ever see the last 2k saved pages and now I bookmark things locally so at least sort of unified there. The issue that I'm thinking about here is finding active UI elements that already contain what I am looking for. I have been able to do this to a certain extent in Emacs by writing commands to go to a specific buffer that is already open, except that even that doesn't quite for a variety of reasons including the fact that sometimes you want some exact state and sometimes you want a clean slate and in Emacs in particular doing that can completely mangle buffer ordering. At some point I will get fed up with the current state of things and fix whatever brain dead heuristic destroys the buffer ordering but for now I find workarounds. Essentially the issue is that yes, it would be great to be able to put a pin in the high dimensional state space that is a computer + network and just ... go back to that point, but even ignoring the engineering challenges my experience is that the dominate UI paradigms haven't really even considered the issue (though the research community surely has).
- BeFlatXIII 5y ago
  I have the Tree Tabs extension to blame for enabling me to be a member of the 100+ tab club. What it allows that bookmarks do not is a clear way to swap between dynamic groups of related tags. A somewhat real-world example: I have 5 tabs open for reference on an Elixir project I plan to return to over the weekend and 12 tabs open for a Python project I’m currently working on. When I’m done with today’s Python work, I expect to have no more than seven of those Python tabs remaining.
heed 5y ago
You can search your tabs in Chrome now.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
stevenhuang 5y ago
The plugin Vimium is one I use a lot for exactly this. I just press T, fuzzy match any tab title across all my windows, then switch to it instantly.
dangirsh 5y ago
Surfingkeys for Chrome/Firefox has a great open/closed tab search feature. For desktop windows, I use XMonad + Rofi to summon windows via fuzzy search.
alehander42 5y ago
you can use % in firefox to search tabs and ^ to search history and more https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-autocomplete-firefox#w_changing-results-on-the-fly https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-autocomplet... EDIT: and even Vinnl shared it first here , sorry for dup, but maybe you haven't seen it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27351289 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27351289

by tgbugs 5y ago

samename 5y ago

Firefox lets you go to a tab that’s already open by entering the title or url.

Vinnl 5y ago
You can also search for tabs if you type a % in the address bar or via a menu entry: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/search-open-tabs-firefox https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/search-open-tabs-firefo...

quirkot 5y ago

I say this with all the love and compassion in my heart: have you tried bookmarks? Not trying to be snide, but having that many tabs open and expecting to ever come back to the same one twice is 100% incomprehensible to me. But, I freely admit, I start trying to pare down when my tabs get narrower than the default width. I've gathered that I'm an anomaly

tgbugs 5y ago
I hear you. I do use bookmarks, and sometimes they work better than a google search, but they are a solution to a different problem (a problem for which sometimes I wonder whether it doesn't make sense to store the raw html of every page I ever visit and stick it in a full text search index ... org capture maybe?), and they are siloed inside their specific apps or websites. I got burned by using reddit's save functionality without realizing that you can only ever see the last 2k saved pages and now I bookmark things locally so at least sort of unified there. The issue that I'm thinking about here is finding active UI elements that already contain what I am looking for. I have been able to do this to a certain extent in Emacs by writing commands to go to a specific buffer that is already open, except that even that doesn't quite for a variety of reasons including the fact that sometimes you want some exact state and sometimes you want a clean slate and in Emacs in particular doing that can completely mangle buffer ordering. At some point I will get fed up with the current state of things and fix whatever brain dead heuristic destroys the buffer ordering but for now I find workarounds. Essentially the issue is that yes, it would be great to be able to put a pin in the high dimensional state space that is a computer + network and just ... go back to that point, but even ignoring the engineering challenges my experience is that the dominate UI paradigms haven't really even considered the issue (though the research community surely has).
BeFlatXIII 5y ago
I have the Tree Tabs extension to blame for enabling me to be a member of the 100+ tab club. What it allows that bookmarks do not is a clear way to swap between dynamic groups of related tags. A somewhat real-world example: I have 5 tabs open for reference on an Elixir project I plan to return to over the weekend and 12 tabs open for a Python project I’m currently working on. When I’m done with today’s Python work, I expect to have no more than seven of those Python tabs remaining.

heed 5y ago

You can search your tabs in Chrome now.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

stevenhuang 5y ago

The plugin Vimium is one I use a lot for exactly this. I just press T, fuzzy match any tab title across all my windows, then switch to it instantly.

dangirsh 5y ago

Surfingkeys for Chrome/Firefox has a great open/closed tab search feature. For desktop windows, I use XMonad + Rofi to summon windows via fuzzy search.

alehander42 5y ago

you can use % in firefox to search tabs and ^ to search history and more https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-autocomplete-firefox#w_changing-results-on-the-fly https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-autocomplet... EDIT: and even Vinnl shared it first here , sorry for dup, but maybe you haven't seen it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27351289 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27351289