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Comment by helmholtz | Hacker News Reader

Zen. And MaxTabs. I limit myself to 5 tabs by force. Anything more, it means I'm becoming scatterbrained and need to revisit what I already have opened and think more linearly rather than in a spastic manner.

I tried saving tabs for reference material, but I prefer something simpler. I shutdown my PC at the end of the day. I have a dump.txt where every link that might get needed tomorrow gets pasted.

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This is intriguing. Do you happen to have a blog post or similar documentation about your process?

I don’t understand what’s so complicated about this. I’ve also never allowed myself to have more than 5-6 tabs at a time because it just seemed reasonable. I’m not sure what I could possibly be doing that requires more tabs. I have an organized bookmark folder structure for things I absolutely need to get back to/visit regularly. I’m using my browser for no more than a couple streams of thought at any given time.

That's a pretty aggressive and unhelpful response. While your brain might be tuned to perfect tab management, I've worked with very talented people who hang on to tons of tabs (amongst other idiosyncrasies). Some want to change (I deign to consider myself one of these people), others don't and still go on to be productive, awesome developers.

You seem to have mastered pure focus which is an amazing, coveted trait, but we don't all have it.

I'm not trying to come off as aggressive. It's that I don't understand what more than 15 tabs could realistically be used for. I don't think I could find a use for more than 15 tabs if I tried at any given time. At work as an engineer I usually have a tab with Bitbucket, at most 3-4 tabs for pages/documentation I'm reading, a tab with Jira. Maybe I have a tab or two on Youtube to put something on in the background. So as I'm reading comments about people claiming to have > 1000 tabs, I can't comprehend what's going on in that situation. The only way that could happen is if I simply never closed tabs when I was done with the task I was looking at it for. It would never make sense to not close it if I don't need it because after 15+ tabs being open it becomes too hard for me to find anything because the tabs are so small. I'm incentivized to close tabs when I don't need the information anymore because the browser becomes unusable quickly. I know how to get back to just about anything I was looking at and if it's important enough that I'm revisiting it often it gets bookmarked.

It's less aggression and more disbelief/shock because I don't understand how it would be possible to use a browser with more than 15 tabs open.

I'm not who asked, but I can explain my own and other's perspective: don't passively accumulate detritus. If you want to remember something , you must write it down or take a note, just like if you were in school. Don't just "throw another tab on the pile". That's like a .txt file full of links you're just pasting and pasting into. Are you really ever going to go and review those links?

Folks who successfully have huge numbers of tabs and who really love that, in my experience, are treating their tabs like a different kind of bookmark, or they just have a ton of bookmarks. They'll usually use a categorization feature of some kind in order to organize their tabs just like someone organizes a library. Whether you're using tabs, bookmarks, written notes, whatever, all these systems in general are just some form of active tracking.

If you're not actively organizing and tracking though, why not free yourself and merely close your tabs aggressively? It's pretty easy, just uncheck the "Re-open tabs on startup" or the equivalent in your browser settings, then just click the "close" button on your window with all your hundreds of tabs. Let them go, and free yourself of worrying about them!

Besides, if you REALLY need them, you've always got your browser history anyway ;)

This. I used to be one of those who opens a tab to read and address this queue later on. I realized it's not efficient (at least for me) because things keep adding up and I sometimes have weeks/months old tabs that I never got to. So I started using a simple task management stuff and it's made an amazing difference for me. Granted that it might be a bit more work, but overall I feel more productive and organized.

Kudos. If I need to do something or return to something it becomes a card in Trello, not a tab which I always need to evaluate if I need it open or not, is it important or not, what did I want to do with this information last time I saw it etc.

And Trello card is an action item which will eventually get to the "DONE" column, will be decomposed into actionable items or will be deleted/archived during the next review event.

Yeah, I've tried the Trello board, and writing down notes, org-mode and other and I have a large graveyard of all of those that get lost. I think for me, tabs remain successful because they are ever-present and insert themselves into

I open tabs in groups in Sidebery. For stuff you plan to return to they are better than bookmarks because there’s no switching between bookmark and tab lists (you’ll always have tabs anyway) and clicking a tab switches to the tab and focuses it’s group of related tabs in the list rather than opening another tab.

I also don’t have to close them to return later or curate them — more time and thinking saved. Sidebery unloads tabs in collapsed groups so even though I have a few hundred open across two Firefox windows, probably less than 20 are consuming RAM and other resources.

I don’t really use bookmarks. I don’t think they solve any problem very well. Both tabs and notes/documents with links in are better.

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