How I'm combining extensions to replace Tabs Outliner
Let me start this by praising how TO is wonderful. I purchased its licence almost 2 years ago and it has been my main productivity and organization tool for sites and tabs. It escalates wonderfully for many hundreds of tabs and its tree structure with node element makes it very easy to organize them all.
It's rly sad that it's abandoned and issues ppl faced almost a decade ago are still around.
I started looking for alternatives, and indeed there's no Chromium or FireFox extension that steps anywhere close to have TO features.
I'm listing here the tools I've been using to get the features I have with TO.
1) Brave browser: it rly annoys me to use Chrome. I hate how Mozilla had crippled FireFox with its Quantum remake. Many awesome addons were killed and its new API is too limited to allow any serious customization of the browser. That made me move to Chromium years ago, but I never wanted to use Chrome. TO forced me to, and now I'll be free from it.
2) TabFern: it's very very limited, but it's the best available. It doesn't support organizing tabs on tree structure, it doesn't have note nodes. But it supports multiple windows and manages all of them from its own window, as TO does. To organize tabs on groups, each group must be in its own window. It supports backup to a normal file saved anywhere on HD, its data uses json. That's great, as we can save backups anywhere we want and edit them manually. Restoring is trouble, as we can't backup-restore single windows and are forced to place all windows on the file. When restoring, all windows on the file are duplicated. But it's open source, it's being slowly developed, and there are a few ppl working on its development.
3) OneTab: its Usability is very very bad, it simply copies all opened tabs to a internal list of links placed on a internal HTML page and then closes them all. This list is stored internally on the browser and there are reports of it corrupting. But it supports exporting and importing them, using plain text for that. By doing so I'm able to keep my tabs organized on an external tool (4). I export each group of tabs to there and delete it from OneTab, and when I wanna open a tab from it I either copy its URL or import the whole group back to OneTab.
4) TheBrain: it's a great mind mapping tool, it's been some years I bought a license for it and now created a new brain for managing tabs. It's a really very powerful tool for organizing complex data, much more powerful them a "simple" tree structure, which most tabs managers don't even have. Each node has 1 or more tabs groups, composed of OneTab list of tabs. I either browse its structure or search for anything I want, then either take a URL or copy a full list and import to OneTab.
Yeah, it requires combining 2 extensions and 1 external tool, and requires a very lot of clicks to move tabs around. TO is much more comfortable to use, but it also has its lots of issues and lack of support.
Organizing tabs on a Brain structure is much more powerful than a tree structure, and I believe I won't wanna turn back once I have all my tabs moved to it!!
where enter license key paid version
I can't find where to enter my license key for the paid version. Also, I am using Tabs Outliner on a laptop where the mother board had to be replaced. Is there a requirement so that I can continue to use this great program without repaying the fee?
Tabs Outliner doesn't recognize paid mode after Chrome re-install
I reinstalled my OS and I'm unable to associate my email address with Tabs Outliner to enable paid mode.
Clicking the Purchase License directs me to a shopping cart. I already have a license, but I don't know how to enable it.
Why can't I used shift/ctrl for selecting multiple tabs/windows?
I believe the current functions for the shit/ctrl + click are rather ridiculous and can easily be implemented with a button or rather just simply removed as one can simply do them with the right click button(I am talkin about google chrome's 'open link in new tab/window').
What I am suggesting is, allow the user to press shift/ctrl and click to select multiple tab/windows and preform a given function, like delete or move.
Ability to quickly save snapshot of session to persistent groups
I love the paradigm of TO that lets you maintain context, but keep tabs unloaded. An important part of maintaining context is being able to return to that context between browser/computer restarts. If TO had a button that let you "save to session" where a snapshot of the current session is saved to a persistent session/group.
Sessions could be named "[YYYY-mm-dd] - <optional user description>", and could be sortable by date or name. The issue I foresee coming up if it was possible to save sessions over a long period of time is that the sessions folder would get massive, so some sort of automatic grouping like:
+ recent
+ year
++ month
would make it much easier to keep long term sessions stored in TO.
It would also be nice to be able to move or copy tabs between sessions. This would let you do something like create project specific sessions (a "research" session for school/work project, a "blogs/news" session for random articles that you may have gotten interested in, etc) and if you need to focus on your work and not be distracted you can save your current session with all your "distraction" tabs, and switch over to your "work" session.
The above are only suggestions for possible implementations, an extension similar to TO which shall not be named ;) implements this feature using a dropdown list for different sessions.
To sum it up, the real feature request is "more robust session management" to be able to manipulate and store sessions long term.
Thanks for the awesome extension :)
Actually planed, and this is something from top priorities. Yet will be implemented maybe slightly different, but will satisfy same use case.
Not list own Tabs Outliner's window in the tree
It should probably be filtered out.
Disable "Backup To Google Drive Currently Disabled" warning
There is a persistent message in my Tabs Outliner that says "Backup To Google Drive Currently Disabled! Authorize Google Drive Access in Tabs Outliner To Enable It."
I do not want to use this feature, and I do not want to see this message. When I close the message, it just comes back.
Sort tabs in windows --> dedupe tabs
I create quite a few tabs in a window, and the list gets quite big. Sometimes I inadvertently create a tab that is the same as one in the list. I would love to be able to sort the tabs in a window so I can easily see duplicate tabs and remove them. Ideally I'd love an actual dedupe feature, but that sounds complicated and hard. :)
A close button in the address bar
This extension would gain many points in my view if I didn't have to hunt for the tab in the outliner when I want to save close one. Isn't there a possibility to add a button on the right side of the omni bar, next to the bookmark star, that would do this? A keyboard shortcut for bonus points?
There's just too much mousing involved right now, and I (and many internetters like myself) really dislike mousing.
Thanks for a great extension, I'm really hoping something like this could be done.
Allow TO user to "lock" selected URLs
The docs are right, once you get used to the paradigm TO's a great tool. I'm finding one thing very frustrating that may well be my fault, I can't believe Vladyslav doesn't have the same need it seems so basic. With a "normal bookmark", it doesn't change in normal use, you have to go back to the "manage bookmarks" function in order to update it a new location/parameters whatever. But with TO the placeholders are "live" and when I click around and change the app in that tab, I lose the original pointer.
This is of course great - some sessions are a "work in progress" so when I restore and then continue navigating, I want the saved tabs to be kept up to date with the live session.
However other pages ("sticky"? "locked"?) are just starting points, say to a particular viewport/zoom level on a googleMap, and I want the "bookmark" back in TO to keep that particular URL as static, NOT keep updating as I click around in that tab.
My current workaround is to (try to remember to) use Chrome's "Duplicate" tab function and then quickly close/save the TO tab, and do all my navigating in a "temporary/scratch/working" copy tab, then closing it from the browser knowing the original "bookmark" is back in TO.
I would suggest a little "lock/unlock" icon, defaulting to unlocked which means "leave this URL unchanged" no matter what is done after launching it in the browser.
This would also function as a "don't lose this if I close the window from the browser" button - right now I'm putting nothing-but-an-x notes below hundreds of saved tabs because I'm constantly forgetting to save/close from the TO panel, very kludgey workaround.
This is a tremendous application Vladyslav, just some minor suggestions, overall THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!
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