Hacker News Reader

Comment by CharlesW | Hacker News Reader

Wow! My first thought was, "How would anyone discover that?" How did you?

I discovered it ... by reading the linked article to the end. Now if they knew about it before I'd like to know how ;-)

For me it was documented in another browser and I tried it in Chrome and it worked.

I tried shift-clicking a range of tabs on a whim about a year ago, and it worked.

Once you've done that, you can drag the whole selection into another window or a new window too.

This has been a pattern for selecting ranges of text for a long time: if you place your cursor in one location and shift click in another it will select all the text in between. Also works with most file browsers. It's not too hard to imagine generalizing this to tabs, too.

Bonus fact: the itemized selection done via Ctrl-click also works with tabs. If you use Ctrl-W you can close these tabs, or if you drag one of them you can extract all the selected tabs to a new window.

Speaking of patterns, I was pleasantly surprised that cmd+g works same on many browsers as in text editors - navigates to a next search result.

> It's not too hard to imagine generalizing this to tabs, too.

For sure, it's an "obvious in retrospect" sort of thing once stumbled upon. :) After a bit of research, the mechanics appear to have debuted in Chrome in 2013. Any earlier examples?

Because it's the same as selecting files in Explorer

There's a GIF at the end of the linked article.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com