>> I have 37 windows open, with some 75+ tabs
>> I have a Desktop scattered with (currently) 132 icons
>> Programs need to cut it out with the dreaded “do you want to review the 88 open documents” crap.
There is no technology that can solve those problems. Just close your stuff, man.
> having 500 tabs open in mobile Safari, which I always do, doesn’t hurt my system performance at all because the tabs are freeze-dried when I’m not using them.
When you have so many open tabs, there's no difference between a "freeze dried" tab, and just an entry in your browser's history. If your system performance on desktop is hurt by having 37 windows open, the solution is to just close all these windows. I guarantee you're not going to miss them.
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1: It's probably not exactly the same in Safari / iOS, but gotta be the same ballpark: In Firefox / Android I can see fewer than ten tabs at a time. (Hm, that number must have shrunk in a recent update.)
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.
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
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
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).
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.
I just press T, fuzzy match any tab title across all my windows, then switch to it instantly.
For desktop windows, I use XMonad + Rofi to summon windows via fuzzy search.
Sure there is. It's just not implemented in most software - including, in particular, web browsers.
I currently have 192 buffers opened in the Emacs session on my desktop. 143 on my work machine. That's quite low - both sessions have less than a month of uptime, and I was on ~10 days of leave during that period. I can easily run to 300+ buffers in a few days of work. I've never complained about too many buffers being opened.
The trick that makes it works is the tooling around management of open buffers.
I only ever see one or two, maybe four, at any given time. There's no tab bar. Switching is done with incremental search - I start typing a substring of a buffer's name, and in 3-5 keystrokes narrow the list to the one buffer I want. The list of candidates starts in most-recent-first order. I could enable fuzzy matching, or matching by both name and type, but I personally don't need it, I have a good memory for buffer/tab/file names.
If and when I need to manage buffers in bulk, I fire up the ibuffer interface (which I do by holding CTRL a bit longer, to turn `C-x b` to `C-x C-b`). There I get a table of all buffers, with columns showing the buffer name, size, modification status, mode (i.e. "buffer type" - associated application for handling it), and filename or process bound to the buffer. With a few keypresses, I can sort and filter the list by any of these properties (and a bunch of others). Filters can be incrementally combined. I can mark entries on the list (whether manually, or by a filter), and perform bulk operations on them.
And in case you think this is hardcore techie interface - it isn't. It's essentially a streamlined, keyboard-oriented version of what Windows Explorer in "Details" view gives you for your files. I think even casual, non-tech-savvy users are pretty familiar with this view.
I'm pretty sure the entire problem of "too many tabs" would go away if the browser did these three things: get rid of the tab bar, provide a decent switcher UI that, beyond the mouse, supports incremental search from keyboard, and provide a table view for managing the tabs.
Most editors I use at least have recovery temp files. The step from recovery files to not asking annoying questions is easy.
In one way, it sounds like transient information-hoarding, something few would really desire on a real desktop.