Tips and tricks - l10nelw/select-tabs GitHub Wiki

General

  • How to manually select (and deselect) multiple tabs:
    • Ctrl+click (or Cmd+click) a tab to add it to (or remove it from) a selection.
    • Shift+click a tab to select all tabs between it and the current tab, inclusive.
  • Select Tabs → Duplicates is more effective with a url cleaning extension installed, which removes unnecessary tracking parameters that would mess with duplicate-matching.
  • Can't see some of your selected tabs scattered all over an overflowing tab bar? A few options:
    • Use Select Tabs → Cycle Forward/Backward to switch between them, without losing the selection.
    • Gather them together by right-clicking one of them and Move Tabs → Move to Start/End.
    • Alternatively Move Tabs → Move to New Window, or drag them off the tab bar for the same effect.

Context menu related

  • To see how many tabs are currently selected, right-click a selected tab to find certain menu items that display the count e.g. Send 5 Tabs to Device, Close 5 Tabs.
  • On Windows and Linux, every Select Tabs menu item has an access key, indicated by an underlined letter. For example, to access Select Tabs → To the End while the tab context menu is open, press S (more than once if other menu items also share this key) and then E.
  • Select Tabs makes native tab context menu items Close Multiple Tabs and Select All Tabs practically redundant. Why not get rid of them?
  • Shift+click a menu command to add the newly generated selection to the existing one.

Keyboard related

If you like using Select Tabs via keyboard shortcuts, here are some keyboard-driven tab navigation tips:

  • Ctrl+1 all the way to Ctrl+8 (or Cmd+1..8) switches to the first to eighth tab.
  • Ctrl+9 switches to the last tab.
  • If you've enabled "Ctrl+Tab cycles through tabs in recently used order" in your browser settings:
    • Ctrl+Tab to switch to the previously seen tab. If you hold down Ctrl you get thumbnails of recent tabs you can Tab through.
    • Ctrl+Shift+Tab opens the tab list menu. Unfortunately this helpful shortcut is not available without this browser setting on. Otherwise: Ctrl+Tab to switch to the next tab on the right, Ctrl+Shift+Tab to the previous tab on the left.
  • Manually targeting tabs is not straightforward. Alt+D, Ctrl+L (or Cmd+L) or F6 to focus on the address bar, then Shift+Tab a few times until a tab receives focus. Then use Left/Right arrows to traverse the tab bar.
    • Another way to get focus on the tab bar is to click just above the last focusable item on a page (e.g. a link, button, input field) and then press Tab enough times until the current tab has focus.

Grab "tab trees" with or without Tree Style Tabs, Sidebery, et al.

Whether you are a user of a visual "tab tree" extension or not, Select Tabs can be a lightweight companion or even substitute for showing implicit tab relationships, via the parent/descendant/sibling commands.

Note: By default, tab relationships do not survive tabs/windows/the browser being closed. Most tab tree extensions remedy this though.