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Comment by Yoric | Hacker News Reader

Looks like the stuff of dreams and nightmares for a ADHD user.

Am I the only one who regularly ends up a browsing session with 300 tabs? This feels like a feature I'd overuse, and which would only make my life much worse.

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I recently discovered the working memory component of ADHD and it became somewhat of a transformative moment for me. It helped me realize that clearing my plate was the most important activity I could do on any given day, because it created the space I needed to focus, and reduced the strain I felt in a day. It has taken time but I've now found when I look at tabs (or screenshots or whatever clutter) and think not about what I'll save or lose, but about how much more I will do if I don't have the clutter, I start to see it not as something lost but something gained, and it has helped. It doesn't always work, but sometimes it does, and its amazing on those days.

Agreed, but even more so, to the extent that I try to do this "plate-clearing" early and often, in between tasks over the course of a single day, and somewhat obsessively close both browser tabs and desktop windows.

This doesn't mean that more comprehensive browser (and more general desktop) session management tools couldn't be useful!

As it stands, for long-running tasks that necessarily need to be interrupted, I tend to use task-specific VMs, which is wasteful in cases where no background processing is involved.

For example, it'd be useful to extend browsers' (and certain other applications, including macOS applications by UI convention) save/restore state on application quit/restart features to allow multiple state instances to be saved/restored (while still allowing usefully global state to be shared, unlike, e.g., Firefox profiles).

Now imagine the same thing, but across applications and integrated with the desktop environment as, e.g., named, persistent virtual desktop sets.

I've been dreaming of this exact idea for a decade. Task specific workspaces.

For me tab accumulation is often related to fear of loss, sort of a digital hoarding of things that I might need someday. So it's possible I'd be better here knowing that my history was always there.

I think it would be even more helpful if I could easily tag things along the way, and then quickly search both my tags and content of seen pages. Confidence I could find something again would make it easier for me to close tabs.

For what it's worth, as a fellow ADHD person, these days I regularly go on tab-closing sweeps (generally at some related event, like starting or stopping work for the day or when starting or finishing a task). I try to have one window per ongoing task, and then find places for the other tabs. E.g., if a task represents or is related to a possible to-do, I'll put in in my kanban board. If it's a to-read, it goes to instapaper. If I just thought it was interesting and might want it again, I'll put a line in my LogSeq journal with a short description. The general theory being that if I'm not just hoarding, the I'm saving a tab for a reason, so I should articulate the reason and put the tab somewhere I'll find it again when the the time is right.

For ADHD you'd love offpunk. It's an offline Gemini, Gopher and minimal web browser.

You add bookmarks/RSS feeds or whatever, run

       offpunk --sync

and then

       offpunk

Finally you type down

       tour  (or t)

at the prompt and then keep pressing (t) until you finish all the blogs/news sites and such. The site is read with the space bar. If you want to read again, type down 'less', and you can enter the number of the links to access them. To go back, press 'b'.

Everything is kept offline for further usage.

URL https://sr.ht/~lioploum/offpunk/

I had exactly the same. I need something to keep me on track. Or, at least something that signals me "headsup! you are rabbit-holing" rather than encouraging me to rabbit-hole.

OTOH, being able to quickly go back to the junction where I left the path I was supposed to follow, is invaluable too.

In vim, I also never got my head around the undo-branching feature. I understand it, but fail to use it in practice. I guess my ADHD brain can handle linear history better than a branching history.

Offload tabs to OneTab when the amount is overwhelming.

I regularly have to declare tab bankruptcy. By which I mean I bookmark the several hundred still-open tabs in a folder named after the date of said declaration.

…you know, in case I, uh, want to continue to work through them some other day... :|

Isn’t that the history feature ? :)

Well chrome only stores history for 90 days. And firefox has some mystery algorithm if you don't override it. But even if that gets fixed, raw history is a horrible mess compared to saving just the tabs that stayed open.

Also a bookmark folder is itself inferior to actually saving tabs with the per-tab history intact.

I was thinking, this would be really useful for doing research. But you remind me, I also have 400+ tabs open in my browser right now without any chance of going down, and how this going to spiral out of control.

I prune mercilessly. I currently use chrome grouping as the main way to reduce tab spam

adhd, end up in a lot of rabit holes. Had 1500 tabs once. (It's possible to have these many tabs open)

Try this! https://www.skipper.co/

4000+ here, I don't even bother pruning them anymore, I just switch browser profiles. I've got about 4 4000+ profiles.

Excessive? Yep.

I worked on Firefox to make sure that it kept working (and in particular starting up and closing) when you reached several thousand tabs :)

Might not have been a good idea in the end :)

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