Show HN: Tabli – A Tab Manager for Google Chrome

Show HN: Tabli – A Tab Manager for Google Chrome(antonycourtney.github.io)

52 points by antonycourtney 10 years ago | 21 comments

raphaelb 10 years ago |

Very cool... I've been using TabsOutliner which has been a joy for me, but I like some of the UI refinements it looks like you have.

I've always wanted to do this same thing but include other applications / files and be able to easily pop in or out of a session or project.

eivarv 10 years ago | |

I'm currently working on something like what you mention on your second line (something like a project manager for the OS), after creating a terminal project manager [0] (shameless plug).

I'll probably have a prototype/alpha-relase (OS X only, for now) within a few weeks.

As for Tabli, it looks pretty useful!

[0]: https://github.com/eivind88/prm

dgorbik 10 years ago |

I haven't used an extension itself, but the code is very pleasant to look at, clean and functional (which is not surprising given your Haskell background). Is this your first attempt at using React? How hard would it be to port it to Safari?

antonycourtney 10 years ago | |

Thanks! This was not my first project with React, but it was a playground for me to experiment with some novel React ideas (like css-in-js) and different ways of structuring the application. After some frustrating attempts to organize Tabli using Flux I ended up abandoning Flux and creating my own alternative micro-framework called OneRef, a sort of Redux-lite for use with the wonderful Immutable.js library for maintaining application state. I have a draft Medium post about this that I hope to publish one of these days...

comatose_kid 10 years ago |

This is amazing, thank you. For those of you who didn't read the Usage guide: "Use the keyboard shortcut (Ctrl-. by default). It’s worth memorizing this."

btw, I'm not sure why but Tabli isn't searchable on the Chrome store for me.

antonycourtney 10 years ago | |

Thanks, glad you like it. Tabli wasn't searchable in the Chrome store for the rather silly reason that I hadn't gotten around to making promotional tiles. I just made some mediocre ones for now and made it public / searchable; I can improve the tiles later :-)

thehoff 10 years ago |

I really like this after playing with it for a short bit here.

Question though, the "Other Windows", that's on my current machine right? Can I not see windows open on another machine like in the History tab?

antonycourtney 10 years ago | |

Glad you like it. You're correct, Tabli is only intended to help you manage windows and tabs within the current browser session on your current machine. Saved Windows (http://antonycourtney.github.io/tabli/tabli-usage.html#save-...) are stored as bookmark folders so will sync as normal bookmarks and show up when you start Chrome on a different machine. (Currently saved windows are only loaded when Tabli initializes, but that's fixable.) I don't use Chrome on multiple machines simultaneously so hadn't really considered this use case. Thanks for bringing to my attention, will give it some thought.

eivarv 10 years ago | | |

As someone that almost never closes applications or powers down his computers, I'd also like to see this!

EDIT: Great job, nevertheless!

softawre 10 years ago |

Long time user of TooManyTabs. This is better. I figured there'd be a keyboard shortcut, since this was posted on HN after all, and thank goodness.

Cheers.

Eridrus 10 years ago |

This is great!

I often end up with close to 100 tabs open, so I'm super happy about this!

However, I spent a second thinking about: how do I get to this point? And the answer is I click on a pile of links and plan to get to them later. It might actually be better if I had a way to easily just turn the links into some form of bookmarks without holding open a tab for them.

antonycourtney 10 years ago | |

There's another extension that does something like what you propose called one-tab: http://www.one-tab.com/ Those that use One Tab seem to love it, and if it fits the way you want to work...great! One concern with what you propose is: Doesn't this just end up moving the problem from having a disorganized pile of tabs to having a disorganized pile of bookmarks? For my style of working, I find I have certain anchor pages for a topic or project that I refer to regularly. Although I also open many tabs, I wanted an easy way to discard these ephemeral tabs but get back to my base state of anchor tabs. The "Revert" functionality in saved windows helps with this: http://antonycourtney.github.io/tabli/tabli-usage.html#rever...

Eridrus 10 years ago | | |

It does convert the problem from a giant mess of tabs to a giant mess of bookmarks, but at least bookmarks don't use much CPU/RAM.

I was thinking of installing The Great Suspender, but not all my tabs are ephemeral, but I guess it has a way to configure domains it shouldn't suspend, so I might try that together with your extension.

TheOtherHobbes 10 years ago |

I really really like this too.

I was thinking of building something similar because I regularly have >200 tabs open.

This looks like it does everything I wanted, and then some. Nice!

monting 10 years ago |

Very nice.

Shameless plug on a lightweight (~50 lines of code) Chrome extension I wrote called Tab Extract to attack the too-many-tabs-open problem from another angle:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-extract/iphchn...

kawera 10 years ago | |

Hey, this is brilliant!

The ability to reorganize/move tabs between windows helps a lot. I use SessionBuddy and VerticalTabs, plus Alfred's "tabs" search command, but none allow moving tabs to other/new windows.

Tabli has a very nice UI, works well and the code is top notch but no reordering/moving tabs unfortunately.

Another useful extension that doesn't work in recent Chrome versions is TabSplit and so far I haven't found an alternative.(https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-split/imjbfepo...)

Raphmedia 10 years ago |

I LOVE this. As a developper, I have thousands of tabs open at all time and Chrome manage them very poorly.

Thanks a lot for this chrome app.

djkeogan 10 years ago |

If, like me, you suffer from hypertabitis this may just be a solution for you!

h78pf 10 years ago |

Was looking for something like this for quite some time. Great software

colminator 10 years ago |

if your Chrome tabs look like this: http://imgur.com/3Z5GimX then you need to use Tabli!

iKlsR 10 years ago |

OneTab is still the best. It's fun to just push a whole days worth of tabs into a list that you can cherry pick from at will. Not to mention freeing up resources..