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Comment by bbx | Hacker News Reader

It seems to me I’m in the minority by being a minimalist here? I have at most 10 tabs open. Same for Sublime Text open files. I regularly close all but one tab/file just to reset my cognitive load. This does force me to rely on the history from time to time, which I must say is a true pain in Chrome. You can’t even search or filter by date. Also, revisiting a page will move it up the top of the list, which is annoying because I lose all previous instances of when I visited the page.

As for the grouping of tabs, there’s always been a way to group them: a new window. I wish there was a feature to drag+select a group of tabs and send them to a new window. I guess this new feature tries to solve the same problem.

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> I wish there was a feature to drag+select a group of tabs and send them to a new window

There is! Press CTRL while clicking individual tabs OR press SHIFT while clicking the first and last tab you want to move to a new window. Selected tabs appear slightly brighter. Then, just drag. This works in Chrome and Firefox.

Oh my… You just changed my life. Thanks so much for this. (I really should have RTFM).

I wish I could upvote you twice. Whenever I need to separate my tabs from the main window I have to adjust them individually, which is a real pain if you have more than 10 tabs open.

I also rely a lot on the history and that's why I dislike Chrome. It looks like they make the history a pain in the butt on purpose just so that people rely on google to find what they need. I keep my history for a full year in Safari and it's quite easy to search for past websites

My behavior is completely different depending on the tab UI. I'm a minimalist on my desktop: as soon as I'm unable to read at least 10 or so characters of each tab title I start feeling a little restless/cramped and go through and close all the unneeded tabs. This usually happens a couple times a day. I feel a tinge of stress whenever I look at a tab collector's browser window.

OTOH on my phone where the "tabs" aren't prominently shown in the UI I have hundreds of "tabs" going back months/years. (Occasionally I'll look back at them and it'll bring back some memories of when I was researching a certain topic or on vacation somewhere, which can be nice...)

I'm with you, I hate having huge numbers of tabs open, in both IDE and browser land. Some of the devs on my team end up with 30-40 files open in Visual Studio at a time and it just loses me.

I'm always constantly over 100. It mostly spirals out of control when deep in research and going down the rabbit hole.

I'm curious, wouldn't you read the info and process it in your mind, and then close the tab when done? If it's something you will need to reference again later, then bookmark it? Like you know... a book. Put it back on the shelf or have hundreds of books open on the floor.

I do not understand tab people. I do have a meticulously organized bookmark system though. Do tab people use bookmarks much at all?

No because it's more transient. I'm diving into a topic, opening a few different sources, then following links from those sources into further tabs. But I try to roughly group them in windows so I can just close out the window when I'm done with the topic.

I haven't used bookmarks since the De.licio.us days. Most of the time if I do close a tab and need the information again, I know what to search to find it again. The searching in bookmarks is not as good as Google search. And I've been down the route of trying to meticulously organize bookmarks, and I find that in the midst of opening a bunch of tabs while "researching" something, that doesn't happen and so things are just a mess. Or when looking for them the original categorization doesn't match so I don't find it when looking at folders (same reason I prefer labels like in GMail over email folders).

> Put it back on the shelf or have hundreds of books open on the floor.

Which is something people used to do. It was even referenced in movies up until the mid 2000s.

I usually try to reset things a few times a day, and get back to one or two open tabs for the task at hand.

It’s seems many people who go the other extreme don’t use desktop apps but rather have to have a tab for Jira, a tab for Asana, a tab for email, a tab for chat (or three), a tab for music, etc. I use desktop apps and keep most of them hidden with notifications off; My brain kinda falls apart when there are too many things open at the same time!

Agreed, isn't this what bookmarks are for? BTW I always use bookmark toolbar, maybe this is similar to keeping tabs.

Same, the right side of my bookmarks toolbar tends to be the "backlog" or "later" for tab collectors.

Tabs are also a replacement for history. Going to hn, google, reddit, techmeme and opening 10 sites at once, instead of click, scroll, back, find next, click, scroll, back, find next.

>I wish there was a feature to drag+select a group of tabs and send them to a new window

Not exactly what you want, but you can hold Ctrl and multi-select, and then drag them out to make a new window.

By the way, I use the tab the same way as you. If I have more than 10 tabs (mostly doing some research) I open a new window for them.

Opposite to you, if I don't have at least 20 tabs open the tab bar looks naked and weird. I only close when they get to icon size, and am not happy about that. I would like to keep many of them because they are leads I might need later.

Around 10 open, I'm looking to press OneTab. It's break time. Tabs are grouped by time, but it works for me

Same here. I like to only keep open the tabs that I actually need, and that number is usually around 5.

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