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Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 23, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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Can anyone who's beaten a tab addiction share their strategy?

I have something like 1900 tabs open on my PC browser (only a few hundred on phone!) Some of this is old research that I can't close yet, like the heat pump pages I'll be using for the wrap-up post on that project. A lot of it is old motte convos I opened "for future reference, just in case". Lots of them are articles I... really should get around to reading someday. And some of it is literally just crud like youtube music that stopped playing and got forgotten about, recipes I was looking up, or last month's weather forecast.

Things only got out of hand this summer when my PC use dropped to almost nothing, leaving me just enough time to get on, check updates, open a bunch of stuff to read, and then whoops gotta go.

The one big advantage is that I don't have any bookmarks to organize, and tab unloading means there's little/no memory cost.

Is there a saner way to organize this sort of thing? I never had to deal with urls in college, only notes and bibliography info in .txt files on my desktop. How can I save old forum conversations in an easily searchable way? (Help me gattsuru, you're my only hope)

I started splitting my tabs into different windows for different contexts, then I started just bookmarking all the tabs into a bookmark folder when I was done with the subject.

For example, I would sort all Blender related or specific university course related tabs in a single window. Or my EVE or Stellaris related searches. It's a lot easier to bookmark and close a window when it's all related to one topic, and you have some trigger to reopen the bookmark folder once you come back to the topic. Makes it feel less like it's lost to the void.

I also started separating my tabs based on type even if it's not strictly not one subject. Like separating forum posts from YouTube videos from Wikipedia rabbit holes. Every bit of organization also helps to spot things you plainly don't have interest in anymore. At some point I just give up on an old video essay and put it in the watch later folder because I never check the watch later YouTube page (I don't check the folder either). I also use Tree Style Tabs, which makes it easier to rip out some recursive new tab spree onto its own context.

I can't say I've fully beaten the tab addiction though. Now I've just got a lot of windows littering my taskbar as well. I started doing things like putting my video windows or language stuff on another monitor as well as putting my study related things to another desktop (as in Win + Tab). It's certainly more organized, and I've got the satisfaction of knowing I could close these windows if I really wanted to.

Thanks. That's similar to but better than some of my coping strategies. Tree style tabs was definitely the enabler for hundreds of tabs per window!

I was using per-project session backups at one point, but it got too annoying to have to open half a dozen saved windows just to find one particular tab.

Moving things to different windows does make it easier to say "right, everything here is crap." Last time I sat down at the PC with a coffee I managed to close 3 with several hundred tabs, so realistically a few hours of dedicated time should be enough to at least get rid of everything unimportant.