Comment by Modified3019 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Modified3019 | Hacker News Reader

The extension “OneTab” is a great solution for this, at least in reducing the technical consequences of so many tabs.

It dumps all tabs in a window into a list. You can just as easily send those tabs back into a window, or “export” (copy+paste) the list into a text file.

Though what I really need is something that can I can dump a link into from either mobile or desktop (or consume lists of links) and produce a self-hosted searchable archive on my NAS. For example there are many HN threads I’d love to have something to archive both whatever the link was, and the associated thread with all of the comments, with increasingly rare checks for changes, saving the differences in case of censorship. Finally, being able to add both automatic and manual tags for the listing, and a way to search either the tags or text content so I can find that cool project I want to get back to, or they insightful comment.

Actually that’s another thing I’d love is the ability to highlight specific comments or sections of pages and give them their own set of tags for searching.

Such a thing would clear up my “need” for so many bookmarks/link lists, because it would actually complete the task I want to accomplish.

OneTab is my solution to tab hoarding as well. Its "send all to onetab" button is like flushing the toilet of my ADHD brain, and if I ever need a tab back, it's searchable!!

(I've been using onetab for almost 3 years and never gone back and actually re-opened a tab I sent to onetab. But it's kept my open tabs very clean that whole time!)

I’ve actually gone back successfully several times, just enough to convince my lizard brain that “yes it was all absolutely necessary and worth it”.

Unfortunately many times this isn’t successful, and I would absolutely get more use out of it if I could just type “VFIO” or “Linux security” and pare down the search space to find that cool project, documentation or gotcha in a comment that I wanted to refer back to that’s now just a fuzzy blur in my mind.

But I do agree, the vast bulk of it is just coping mechanism to try to soothe the panic of potential loss resulting from the fire hose of novel information falling through my colander brain.

At that point, how different is it from just searching your actual browser history?

It’s an honest question by the way. I don’t think I have ever felt the need to have more than 10 tabs open at the same time - that was when cross-referencing things in Jira - and I generally have no more than 5 open. I would like to understand what I am missing.

I also wonder this. I feel burdened if I have more than 9 tabs open.

W.r.t. the difference to browser history though: I literally never find stuff when looking through my browser history. I either forgot on which website I found something, or what the name of the tab was. I sometimes wish that searching the browser history also searches through some additional metadata, like the sites description meta tag or something like that.

The browser history also contains all the pages that shouldn’t be searched / aren’t interesting, making searching more difficult

My open tabs constitute a much smaller percentage of my total browsing than the history, even though there's useful stuff in both.

Speculating (extrapolating?) for someone who keeps a lot of tabs open: tabs represent desired history, closed tabs represent stuff they might specifically want to ignore.

It's almost useful to think of creating two "close tab" buttons -- one that sends the tab to the searchable service, and one that just ditches it.

> Speculating (extrapolating?) for someone who keeps a lot of tabs open: tabs represent desired history, closed tabs represent stuff they might specifically want to ignore.

Yes, it's basically an effortless replacement for bookmarks. Especially if you have Tree Style Tabs or equivalent, opening a link in a new tab creates a child tab that treats the parent as a folder. For example, the way I use it, all HN posts are children of the homepage, and the homepage can be opened/closed like a folder in the sidebar. These go arbitrarily deep, so interesting links from that thread become children of the thread, etc etc.

I made for myself a rather crude solution, that works very good for me. Basically I run a simple HTTP server with busybox-httpd and serve my own new tab page. The new tab page is a bit hacked EasyMDE (markdown editor) with live preview. It saves automatically to disk so I can use Syncthing to distribute the file. I need to add automatic Git commits, but for now it works good enough for me. I managed to cure myself from extensive tab keeping.

For mobile it is more crude as Firefox extensions are more limited. I just use Markor to see the file and Syncthing just works.

I think about making a WebExtension out of this just so I could automatically sync links from the markdown file to a specified bookmark folder.

The code: https://github.com/hadrianw/notetab

I prefer Simple Tab Groups for roughly the same purpose, but it took adding some mouse gestures (in particular a simple one to switch to the next/previous group) to really make it useful. Annoyingly firefox is a bit hotkey/gesture hostile at this point.

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