Awesome

Tab Wrangler

text user interface for browser tabaholics & tab-hoarders, with vim-like keybindings

Features

This program currently helps mainly:

• to give a readable overview of all open browser windows and tabs,

• to find and get back to things you know you have open in some window, and

• to save and close windows of tabs, or groups of them.

Saved windows are currently saved to ~/urls-tab_wrangler as lists of tab-separated values with two columns: title and URL. Untitled ones are numbered and chucked into the untitled subfolder.

Future

The next main features I would like to implement are:

• searching through and reloading previously closed windows

• naming windows, hopefully with some mechanism for persistence across runs

• breaking a group of tabs out into a new or existing window

• implementing "undo"

Support

I wrote this for my own use, and not to share or show off. I do use it on a daily basis myself, but it's still far from complete. I didn't design it with other people's environments in mind. I use Sway window manager in Arch Linux. The feature to shift focus to an open window depends on Sway's swaymsg. I have also been able to test this in Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish), and was able to get that same functionality using wmctrl - see the commented-out line at the end of browser.py for how. In the future, maybe I'll try to support and detect different environments, but for now that's a low priority on the distant horizon. I work on this project once in a blue moon, when I find time and motivation.

Why I'm sharing

I'm sharing this mainly in the hope of helping to keep my main dependency, the amazing brotab, alive, by contributing to its ecosystem. I figure the more useful software there is out there which depends on it, the greater the incentive will be for everyone to help keep that project alive and up-to-date. Maybe eventually people will help contribute to my project too, but at least for now, at first, I can say that I unfortunately won't have much time to offer support for it.

Dependencies

• brotab

• urwid

• for shifting focus to a window:

  • jq
  • Sway window manager, or alternatively wmctrl if using Ubuntu (in which case uncomment the commented-out line at end of browser.py)

Usage

Currently I just keep this in ~/tab_wrangler and run it from ~ with:

python -m tab_wrangler

If there's interest, I could work on making this into a proper Python package and/or providing packages for Arch Linux or Debian/Ubuntu. But for now I am lazy. Pull requests welcome!

Keybindings

c: Close all browser windows, saving their contents to untitled files. Careful, as "undo" is not yet implemented!

d: Close ("(d)elete") a window, or group of windows.

s: (S)ave and close a window, or group of windows.

w: Name, save, and close ("(w)rite") a window, or group of windows.

enter: Focus the selected window.

/: Search forwards.

?: Search backwards.

n: Repeat last search.

N: Repeat last search in reverse.

space: Select a window. Multiple windows can be selected to save and/or close them as a group.

j: Move down a window.

k: Move up a window.

g: Jump to the first window in the list.

G: Jump to the last window in the list.

q: Quit.