I’ve updated my TabJump Chrome extension, which lets you easily search through your open tabs from any windows, and jump into them. A longer explanation of the ideas and functionality of the extension may be found from my first blog posting about it, here.

This time around I’ve changed the core functionality of the extension to make it work more reliably and to enable better end-user customization. Now the extension’s UI is not drawn on top of the current page but instead it utilizes the usual popup container functionality of web extensions. It’s also possible to open it on a separate page, and when doing so, it is aware of its previous appearances and instead of spawning a multitude of TabJump tabs it always focuses on the living one.

The only missing feature as of now is history search. When you open up the search and try to find something that doesn’t exist as a tab on the machine, you need to close the extension, focus the URL bar, and type it in in there. This is of course not-optimal and a pain in the ass. The extension should do two things in a case of a missing match: first, suggest from your history and enable creation of a new tab based on user selection, and second, let you type any URL and hit enter to just get there.

The code is still very experimental and badly organized because of the experimental nature of the development (getting to know the web extension inner workings), and as such, not available anywhere. Also, some bugs might be hiding in the source. If you’d like to try out the extension, you can access it from this public link. When you install it, make sure you open Chrome’s extension shortcuts and map the two functions to some keys (my mappings are: CTRL+, opens the popup while CTRL+. opens the single tab view).

The post TabJump Chrome extension updates appeared first on Pietari Heino's personal website.

I have the habit of keeping multiple Chrome windows filled with more than a hundred tabs. As of late I’ve become very frustrated at finding a specific tab since it can take a bit of time. Also, I hate it when a website opens slowly (eg. Gmail, Google Drive, Facebook, Slack, Twitter etc.) and most of the time prefer to get back to the previous instance of that website in my precious tab collection. Whatever.

I didn’t want to check what the Chrome extension store had to offer. Instead I implemented my own solution. It’s still in beta, as you can see from the screenshot, and it’s freakin’ ugly, but it works as intended. Also, I got to implement something super useful and learned a tad of Chrome extension development. Yikes.

It’s mighty simple. You press jj or JJ (the presses have to happen very quickly and simultaneously) and the grey popup appears. It comes with a search box which then lists all the tabs from all windows based on whatever you type in the search box. The tabs are matched by their URLs and titles. Up and down arrows let you navigate and enter first focuses the window where the chosen tab may be found and then focuses the tab. Perfect. jj + g + enter –> Gmail focused instantaneously.

TabJump has saved me a lot of frustration and made my browsing experience nicer than I previously thought it could be. The extension is very simple but still comes with a very nice usability improvement. Not kidding. I’m amazed how many hundreds of times I’ve used it in the past couple of weeks even though it’s still buggy and looks disgusting.

If you want to try it out, check out this public link. But as I said, it’s buggy, I haven’t had the time (nor the need) to finish it. I’ll try to do that someday and publish the extension in Chrome store publicly.

The post Introducing TabJump, a Chrome extension to … jump between your tabs! appeared first on Pietari Heino's personal website.