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Comment by bruce_one | Hacker News Reader

It's all personal preference, but since Opera 12 I've been addicted to ctrl-tab for most recently used switching (Opera 12 had a nice tab switcher that made the interaction very understandable/manageable), and then alt-tab for switching in "physical" order. (I run a large number of tabs, and quickly switching between two (or a small number) that I've used recently seems to be a common interaction for me - but then being able to look at favicons and traverse quickly to a closely located tab too (is less crucial, but important enough that I don't use FF (because I can't remap that alt-tab interaction simply).)

And I love it :-p It is literally the reason (in combination with "open new tab next to current") I use the browser I do (Vivaldi; would consider Opera, but it doesn't/didn't do "open new tab next to current").

To each their own :-)

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Check out TabMix Plus extension for firefox - you can set up literally everything about tabs behavior.

(It is literally the reason I will not be leaving Firefox after this Ctrl-Tab moves to most recently used tab abomination :))

I was trying out the new Opera with its built-in VPN and ad-blocking which I thought were nice default features but the tab switching was driving me bonkers! I could not understand it, it was flicking through recently used first you say? I would never have guessed. To me it just felt random. I want ctrl-tab to cycle sanely left to right and shift-ctrl-tab to cycle sanely right to left. The browser equivalent of alt-tab for app switching. I do not want any application grabbing alt-tab from the system.

I'm joking of course that I think to desire otherwise is insane. Except I'm not. Or am I? :)

Fair point about alt-tab; I didn't quite make it clear, but I'm using DWM with the windows-key as meta, so meta-tab switches between two tags (do that infinitely often (ie, not cycling, just swapping)) and meta-[0-9] for general tag jumping.

Hence, alt was just hanging out being useless :-p (I'm like 95% terminal or browser, so it's a great use of alt to me :-) )

Amusingly, last time I used OSX or Windows properly, I got super grumpy about the fact "(alt|mac)-tab" seemed amazingly inconsistent - I think cause I'd try and switch consistently between two windows, and got surprising-seeming results... I somewhat think I had gremlins :-p

(As I wrote this I actually did a few ctrl-tabs and a few alt-tabs... I hadn't quite realise I used both as often/evenly...)

a feature that I've loved about Vivaldi (and vimium on chrome) is the spotlight like search for tabs. When you run a lot (~30-40) of tabs, that's an killer feature right away!

Pentadactyl for Firefox also allows that (press 'b') and it's absolutely amazing. Way quicker than searching for the tab visually and manoeuvring the mouse to it on a notebook.

Actually, Firefox has it natively since 48. Just enter the title in the URL bar, and it'll suggest going to that tab.

Firefox has had it native since firefox 4. See this article: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Location_Bar_search#Location_Bar_s...

You can enter "% string" into the location bar, and it will suggest switches to open tabs which contain that string either in their title or URL.

I've been using this little-known location bar feature for a long long time.

Hm, then 48 just changed the way it works, because I've never seen it before that one.

Aside from the fact that the regular URL bar in Firefox does this, Tab Center (https://github.com/bwinton/TabCenter) puts tabs on the side with a filter-search at the top.

This is brilliant! I wasn't aware of tab center. The best part is that it works really well with tabgroups too.

However, I am unable to use it through the keyboard. The undocumented C-S-l seems to trigger a search over there. But there is no way of navigating to a matching tab without the mouse. Any tips?

Ctrl-tab seems to work for me.

The search and hide/unhide function seemed interesting to me, but in my opinion the Tree Style Tab add-on is superior. Perhaps that is because TabCenter is aimed at a less technical audience [1]. Hierarchical tab structures are more valuable in my opinion, because it implicitly groups related tabs together. The structure in which tabs are opened reflects my workflow while opening them and allows me to e.g. close all tabs that were related to a certain problem. It does however lack a search function and some sort of versioning, as I find my tab-bar clutter over time. Perhaps a aging approach could be helpful for me, but I have yet to come across something better than Tree Style Tab.

[1] https://github.com/bwinton/TabCenter/issues/498#issuecomment...

Oh, yeah, I'm not pitching this as an alternative to Tree Style. I like Tree Style too.

With that filter I wonder if we could combine tabs and bookmarks?

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