TabMania

TabMania organizes all your browser tabs across all your windows, and offers an integrated search experience across tabs, bookmarks and browsing history. TabMania makes windows disappear, so you can focus on just your tabs, wherever they might be on your system. Find a lost tab; group tabs in ways that are meaningful to you, not by window; pin your most important bookmarks so if the tab is not already open, you can open it in no time; search and cleanup your browsing history; use keyboard shortcuts to navigate back to a previous tab from anywhere in the system; attach specific tabs to keyboard shortcuts so they're always one keypress away from view, regardless of how many tabs in how many windows you might have open.

Home view

The Home view is where all your browser tabs are listed alphabetically by title. Browser tabs loaded with URLs from the same location (same hostname) are automatically grouped together. You can change this default grouping behavior by configuring custom groups (see Custom groups below for more details).

In the Home view, pinned tabs, pinned bookmarks and pinned groups are listed first, before all other unpinned tabs (see Pinned tabs, bookmarks and groups below for more details). The tab of the home view blinks red every time there's a change in the list of tiles for your browser tabs (new tab, new URL, new title, settings change impacting tiles grouping, etc.).

Understanding browser tab tiles

TabMania lists Chrome tabs as tiles within the Home view of the extension. Each tile includes a few visible bits of information about the state of a browser tab:

• The first line of the tile includes the title of the page associated with the browser tab, and its favicon.
  • If the tile represents a bookmark, a recently closed tab or a browsing history item, then a second icon is displayed next to the favicon, to indicate the type of tile. Only standard browser tabs don't have this second icon next to the favicon.
• The second line of the tile includes the URL of the page associated with the browser tab (bookmarks also list the bookmark folder here) and some icons and badges providing some more info about the browser tab
• If the URL starts with https://, TabMania omits the obvious to leave a tad more room to see the URL. Note that only https:// is omitted, any other protocol will be displayed (including http://).
• Browser tabs with an active audio source show an audible (search badge) icon.
• Muted tabs show a muted (search badge) icon. The icon is in black if the browser tab has an actively muted audio source, that is, if it would become audible if unmuted. Muted tabs without an active audio source show the muted icon in grey. You can mute a tab using the menu action Mute.
• The active (search badge) badge indicates the browser tab is the tab currently visible in its window
• A pinned (search badge) tab displays a thumbtack icon. You can pin a browser tab using the menu action Pin (see Pinned tabs, bookmarks and groups below for more details).
• If you grant TabMania access to your incognito tabs, incognito (search badge) tabs will show alongside other tabs. Incognito tabs are easily identifiable for their reversed color scheme (dark background)
• The SC1, SC2, SC3, SC4 and SC5 (search badges) badges indicate that a browser tab is associated with a custom keyboard shortcut. If the badge is in black, the keyboard shortcut targets that browser tab, while if the badge is in grey, the browser tab is a backup target for the keyboard shortcut (see Keyboard shortcuts below for more details)
• If you hover your pointer over a browser tab tile, the menu dropdown button and the close button appear. You can use the close button to close the tab without bringing it to the foreground.
• The loading status of a tab is encoded with visual clues
  • The tile of an unloaded (search badge) tab is rendered in black&white with italicized title. The tab exists, but Chrome has not fully loaded it yet.
    • You can also explicitly unload a browser tab by using the menu action Suspend, and you can search for all tabs you've suspended this way by searching for the search badge suspended.
    • Bookmarks, recently closed tabs and browsing history items are not loaded by definition, and will display like an unloaded tab.
  • If a tab is loading (search badge), its tile displays a throbber around the favicon.
  • When the tab is fully loaded (search badge), the tile displays normally without any of the visual clues listed above.
• A tab in Wants attention state has its tile's favicon pulsing, and gets temporarily pushed to the top of the tiles list (see The Wants attention state below for more details).

The Wants attention state

Sometimes websites alternate their titles among a few different strings to get the user's attention. Linkedin.com for example switches between its normal title and a title indicating new messages when a new message is received on the site. Unfortunately these indications are completely lost when you have too many tabs on a window and their titles are all but invisible, or when the window is hidden from view. TabMania monitors changes in tab titles, and when it notices this pattern on a tab, it pushes its tile to the top of the TabMania popup, and pulses its favicon. The title change also naturally triggers blinking of the TabMania popup Home view. Never again miss one of these title-based notifications!

Custom groups

Custom groups are a convenient way to keep related tabs grouped together. In the Custom groups setting under the Settings tab you can associate a list of hostnames (or substrings of hostnames) to a custom group, and TabMania will display all matching tabs grouped together. Use this functionality to automatically group all your favorite news site, or all the websites you visit for work, so they always show up together. You can assign a color to a custom group, and that allows members of the custom group to stand out, useful especially during searches. Each custom group name is attached as a search badge of each group member, for search convenience. Custom groups can be explicitly pinned, giving you a convenient alternative to having to pin each individual tab in the group (for more details, see Pinned tabs, bookmarks and groups below).

You can optionally assign a favicon to a custom group, but if you don't specify one, TabMania will pick one from the member tabs listed inside.

Search

Start typing to enter search mode. Search mode allows you to search for open tabs, recently closed tabs, bookmarks and browsing history items. The search string is case insensitive, and it will be matched against title, URL and search badges attached to tabs, bookmarks or history items. Search results are sorted alphabetically by title, and they auto-update as browser tabs change: a tab that's in the search results might go away if its state changes in such a way that it doesn't match the search anymore (e.g. if you load a new URL).

Once you've typed enough characters to easily find what you were looking for, you can click on the browser tab tile to bring the tab to the foreground. Alternatively, you can press Enter to open the first tab in the list of results.

Search badges are a combination of visible badges you can see on the tab tile, plus hidden badges added for search convenience. The hidden badges include audible, muted, highlighted, incognito, pinned, suspended, unloaded and loaded. For recently closed tabs (see Searching beyond open tabs below), the extra search badge closed is also available. For bookmarks (see Searching beyond open tabs below), the extra search badge bookmark is also available.

Example: a tab is playing sounds and you want to mute it; type "audible" to get a list of tabs that are currently playing sounds, and mute it by clicking the "mute" menu action in the tile.

Each keyword you type in the searchbox gets searched through the tabs information, and TabMania includes in the results only tabs that match all the keywords. If you're a power user, TabMania includes a number of operators to influence the way search happens. You can read all the details at Advanced topics: search.

Searching beyond open tabs

TabMania supports searching among bookmarks, recently closed tabs and browsing history items. Go to the Settings view, and under General settings choose which class you want included and which excluded. Do it at any time, even mid-search, to filter in or out extra pages. TabMania restricts bookmarks and browsing history to a maximum of 500 items each during a search. Recently closed tabs are capped by Chrome at a maximum of 25 top level items (either closed tabs or closed windows).

Since all these classes represent pages that are not currently loaded, TabMania's convention is to show their tiles in black&white, similar to unloaded and suspended tabs. The tiles for each one of these classes of objects adds a little icon right before the page title, so you can easily identify which class they belong to. Bookmarks and browsing history tiles also have their own dropdown menus, with specific actions you can take on them (for example, browsing history tiles will tell you how many times you've visited that page in the past, and when was the last time you've seen it). Recently closed tabs on the other hand don't offer any action besides restoring the tab.

Clicking on a recently closed tab will simply restore the tab, exactly like the corresponding action on the Chrome menu. Chrome removes tabs from the recently closed list once they're restored. When clicking on bookmarks or browsing history items, TabMania will instead first try to locate an open tab matching the same URL. If it finds one, it simply activates that tab and bring its window into focus, as if you had clicked the tile of that open tab. If TabMania can't find an open tab matching the URL of the bookmarks or browsing history item, it will open the corresponding URL in a new tab, either recycling an unused new tab you already have open, or opening a fresh new tab in the least tabbed window.

Clicking the Close button of bookmarks and browsing history items deletes the items from the bookmarks or browsing history (no undo).

Recently closed tabs and bookmarks support search by search badges, and offer the additional closed search badge (recently closed tabs) and bookmark (bookmarks) to identify them. Browsing history items don't support search badges, and can only be matched on title and URL.

Pinned tabs, bookmarks and groups

You can pin tabs (either via the Chrome tab menu or the TabMania tile menu action), you can pin bookmarks (via the TabMania tile menu action), and you can pin custom groups (through the Custom groups configuration). Pinned tiles are always listed on top, before all other tiles. Bookmarks are normally displayed only in search mode, but pinned bookmarks are an exception, and they're visible in standard view when there's no open tab matching their URL. Similarly, empty custom groups are hidden from standard view, but pinned custom groups are always present in standard view, even if empty. An empty custom group can be easily identified by the fact that it doesn't have a counting badge on top of its icon.

Pinning inheritance

Open tabs and groups can be explicitly pinned, or can inherit pinning from other objects. Bookmarks never inherit pinning, and can only be explicitly pinned. An unpinned open tab inherits pinning from a pinned bookmark with a matching URL, while a group (either hostname-based or custom) inherits pinning if at least one of its members is a pinned tab or bookmark. Objects that are explicitly pinned show their thumbtuck icon in black, while objects that inherit pinning show their thumbtuck icon in grey.

Incognito tabs

When you install TabMania, initially TabMania doesn't have access to Incognito tabs. To track Incognito tabs with TabMania, you first need to change the TabMania's Chrome extension settings to grant TabMania access to Incognito tabs (for your convenience, a link to the Chrome extension settings is available in TabMania's Settings view). Once you've granted TabMania access to your Incognito tabs, you can configure TabMania to merge the Incognito tabs within the Home (standard tabs) view, or to track the Incognito tabs in their own separate Incognito view. If you choose to track Incognito tabs separately, the Home and Incognito views behave very similarly, except:

• Your Home view searches won't include any Incognito tabs in the search results, and your Incognito view searches won't include any standard tabs in the search results
• Searches in Incognito view query only Incognito tabs and optionally bookmarks
  • Recently closed tabs and browsing history can only be queried in the Home view
• Opening a bookmark from the Incognito view opens the bookmark in an Incognito tab
• While in Incognito view, clicking the TabMania + button creates new Incognito tabs
• Search-related keyboard shortcuts only operate on standard tabs, not on Incognito tabs.

Also note that multi-select actions apply only to the selection in the Home view or in the Incognito view, never to both simultaneously.

The button toolbar

The "open new tab" button

Why would I want to open a new tab from TabMania when I can so easily create a new tab on Chrome itself (CTRL+T, or the + button on Chrome)? Here are a few reasons:

• TabMania tries to recycle lost and forgotten "new tabs" you might have opened in the past and then forgot there without using them
• When the previous trick fails (congratulations, you never waste a new tab!), TabMania opens the new tab in the least tabbed window, to balance how many new tabs you open in your windows. You know when you have a window with a hundred tiny claustrophobic tabs, and another window with just two... well, you're likely going to be on the busy window, but TabMania will open your new tab in the empty one
• If you're on the TabMania popup searching for a tab you thought you had opened, your standard Chrome windows will be far, just use the + button on the TabMania popup!
  • To make things easier, if you have an active search, pressing the + button will activate a launch/search response, similar to the behavior of the "Clipboard launch/search" shortcut, and based on its configured search engine (See "Clipboard launch/search" shortcut below for more information). Of course it will use the text from the searchbox instead of the data from your clipboard for the launch/search action.
• Also, if you have an unconfigured custom shurtcut (see Custom shortcuts below), it will default to "Open new tab", making it very easy to create a new tab from anywhere in the system
  • But, no, you can't override the default CTRL+T, the original Chrome shortcut will win

Keyboard shortcuts

TabMania includes a number of useful shortcuts, described below. You can configure the shortcuts by visiting the TabMania's shortcuts box inside chrome://extensions/shortcuts. The same location can be reached via the Settings menu, in the Shortcuts settings section, by clicking on the shortcut key combination badge under a shortcut title. Note that if you update your shortcuts in the chrome://extensions/shortcuts page, you might need to close and reopen the Shortcuts settings section of the Settings view for the changes to be updated (unfortunately Chrome APIs don't offer notifications back to extensions for changes you make to chrome://extensions/shortcuts).

Most of the shortcuts defined by TabMania are designed to be used in Global scope. You can decide whether you want to set them as Chrome scope (available only when a Chrome window is in focus) or Global scope (available from anywhere in the system). We're suggesting a few keyboard combinations below, but every system, application and personal preference is different, you should decide which combinations make more sense to you.

Shortcut to activate TabMania

It can be useful to add a shortcut to open TabMania without the need to click on TabMania's icon.

Suggested keyboard shortcuts: CTRL+SHIFT+ArrowUp

Navigation shortcuts ("tabs history")

TabMania remembers the sequence of browser tabs you're visiting, and offers shortcuts to move back and forward within your tab navigation history. Navigation is not restricted to a single Chrome window. If you choose to assign these shortcuts in Global scope, you can even jump right back to the last browser tab you were reading, after your little detour to other applications (regardless of how many applications you've visited in the meantime, unlike, say, ALT+Tab).

Suggested keyboard shortcuts: CTRL+SHIFT+ArrowLeft (for "back") and CTRL+SHIFT+ArrowRight (for "forward")

TabMania also offers a variation to the navigation shortcuts that allows you to automatically close the current tab before jumping back/forward to another browser tab. Why is this useful?

• Chrome natively goes back to the previous tab if you open another tab then close it, however, this behavior applies only to tabs within a single window. If you are on a tab X on window A and open a tab Y in another window B, when you close tab Y (provided other tabs still exist in window B), Chrome will go back to another tab in window B, and not go back to tab X on window A.
• If you really really want to nitpick, there's also the case of opening a URL from another application. Say you're on tab X on window A, and let's assume tab X is not the right-most tab on window A. You double click a shortcut/link from Windows Explorer, and a new tab Y opens as the right-most tab on window A. When you close tab Y, you'll find yourself on the new right-most tab on window A, not on tab X.

"Clipboard launch/search" shortcut

TabMania includes a keyboard shortcut to quickly open a new tab, and load the contents of your current clipboard data in it. The exact behavior depends on what's in the clipboard:

• If the clipboard contains a full URL, that URL will be loaded
  • Note that a string like www.google.com is not a valid URL per the standard specification, while https://www.google.com is
• If the clipboard contains text that doesn't match the specification of a URL, the text will be used to launch a web search. The default search engine is google.com, but you can configure a different search engine in the Shortcuts settings section of TabMania's Settings tab.

Suggested keyboard shortcuts: CTRL+SHIFT+ArrowDown

Custom shortcuts

TabMania includes up to 5 custom shortcuts. These shortcuts can be used to jump to a specific tab from any other application, regardless of whether the tab is active. For example, you can set a shortcut to bring to the front the browser tab running your email client. Alternatively, you can configure these shortcuts to offer you more search engine options, if you are the type who searches for different things at different times (web searches with different search engines, product searches on different eCommerce platforms, Wikipedia searches, book searches at your library's website). When set to Search mode, these shortcuts attempt to use the contents of your clipboard to determine the search query. The same shortcut configuration is also available in context menus on the pages you visit, but in that case TabMania will use the text selected on the page as search query, not the contents of the clipboard (see Context menus below for more details).

Because of their search via clipboard capabilities, these shortcuts particularly useful when set to Global scope instead of Chrome scope.

Configuring custom shortcuts Custom shortcuts can be configured in the Shortcuts settings section of TabMania's Settings tab. First though, be sure to have enabled the actual shortcuts in chrome://extensions/shortcuts. For each custom shortcut:

• You can set a shortcut to target either a hostname or a URL (not both)
• Unless you select Always open shortcut in new tab, the browser tab targeted by the shortcut is the left-most tab among all the tabs that match the configured hostname or the complete URL. All other matching tabs are considered "backups" in case you close the targeted tab. If no tabs match the hostname or URL, the shortcut will open a new tab
  • If the shortcut targets a URL, you can change this behavior by selecting the Always open shortcut in new tab option, which will cause the shortcut to always open a new tab, and never reuse existing tabs
• When using a target URL, you can select the Enable search of clipbord contents option to enable the shortcut to replace the first occurrence of the string %s in the configured URL with the contents of the clipboard (shortcut "search mode")
  • %s must be lowercase, %S won't match
  • %s can't be part of the hostname
  • This behavior is similar to the behavior of the custom search engines in the Chrome omnibar, except that it uses the clipboard contents as input
• After the %s replacement, if Always open shortcut in new tab is not selected, the shortcut will try to match the exact URL of an existing tab, and if a match is found, activate that tab. If a match is not found, the positionally left-most tab matching the hostname of the search URL (the target tab) will be opened
• When you configure a custom shortcut, the target tab of the shortcut displays a badge with a shorthand for the shortcut name (e.g. SC2 for the second shortcut)
  • In search mode, if multiple tabs match the shortcut, the target tab will show the badge in black, while all other backup (candidate) tabs will show the badge in grey
  • You can move tabs in the windows to change the left-most tab, or use the corresponding menu action in the tile dropdown menu to reassign the target tab
• You can search for tabs targeted by custom shortcuts by typing the shortcut shorthand in the searchbox
• Any time the shortcut logic decides to open the content in a new tab (either because you have configured Always open shortcut in new tab, or the content is not already available in any of the existing tabs), TabMania will try to find an existing "New tab". If none exists, it will open the new tab in the least tabbed window, like the "Open new tab" logic (see The "open new tab" button section for more details)
• Last, if you don't configure a custom shortcut (or clear the Hostname or URL input), the custom shortcut will default to an "Open new tab" behavior.

Suggested keyboard shortcuts: CTRL+SHIFT+1, ..., CTRL+SHIFT+5

Context menus

TabMania adds context menus to the pages you visit. The main role of these context menus is to activate search-based keyboard shortcuts like Launch/search or custom shortcuts (see Keyboard shortcuts above) using the text selected on the current page instead of the clipboard contents. Other context menu items activate when right-clicking the background of a page or a link, and they're mostly about rebalancing tabs among your open windows (Move to least tabbed window and Open in least tabbed window). Note that Move to least tabbed window will take action only if the current tab is in a window that has at least two more tabs than the least tabbed window (no point in moving a tab if it doesn't rebalance anything). If TabMania decides the tab is ok in the window where it's currently hosted, it will blink its popup's badge to indicate that.

Managing new tabs

When you click a URL fron any application other than Chrome itself (say, open a link from your email client), Chrome creates a new rightmost tab in the Chrome window you most recently used. And if you click the same link again, Chrome dutifully opens yet another tab in that same window. TabMania offers two options to alter that default behavior: Deduplicate new tabs and Move new tabs to the least tabbed window. These features are disabled by default, but you can enable them in the Settings view. You can configure to enable these features only for tabs created from other applications, for tabs created within Chrome when following a link, or for new empty tabs. Regardless of configuration, TabMania always excludes tabs with schema chrome-extension:, tabs opened in the background (e.g. by using CTRL+click), and popups.