Show HN: A browser extension that makes switching between tabs easier | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A browser extension that makes switching between tabs easier

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18 pointsdvdvdmt12 comments

Nice work with this extension, I like that you've made it quite configurable. I personally don't like the auto-switch or scroll effect, but it's good that you added the ability to turn these off using 0 values.

Just a couple of things that I'd suggest to add some improvements to the extension:

- One thing that I'd suggest is adding the ability to Alt + Y, but keep the popup open. This means that you could then do something like navigating the list with tab/hkjl/arrow keys. Without this functionality, the extension basically works the same as pressing Ctrl + Tab, but with a rendered list instead.

- Another thing that would be cool to add is a search function, so that I can Alt + Y, type "hn" or "ycom" and the list would be filtered to show news.ycombinator.com ( also matches the HN ) in the tab title.

Both of these are already available in the vimium extension [1], but would be kind of neat to just have a standalone extension for this functionality.

[1] https://github.com/philc/vimium

Thank you for your ideas! I have a plan for adding the search and the ability to focus on the popup and I want to merge them together. I think that Alt+Shift+Y is not very helpful when you press it the first time, because it just selects the oldest of the visited tabs. And want it to focus on a special search item. Here is an image of what I want to do https://imgur.com/a/qlfVT0M. So, what do you think?

Wow, vimium is amazing! I've always liked keyboard navigation and used a site (long ago, can't remember the name) which was a google clone with keyboard navigation.

Thanks for sharing!

Hello HN!

The Popup Tab Switcher is an attempt to bring the power of your system app switcher to a browser. The extension shows you a popup with last active tabs when you press its shortcut (Alt + Y by default). You cycle through them by holding Alt and pressing Y. By releasing the Alt key you switch to the chosen tab. This is like switching between apps in Windows (Alt + Tab) and in macOS (Cmd + Tab).

Also, when you close an active tab, you will be placed to the previously active one. It is more helpful than the default Chrome's behaviour, which activates the nearest tab.

You can delegate the default switching between tabs (Ctrl + Tab) to the extension, see how https://github.com/dvdvdmt/popup-tab-switcher#replace-defaul...

Thanks for you time, any feedback is welcome!

Wow, that's an amazingly polished extension! I couldn't help but sniff out the [1] github link, and noticed you were using vue.js, I used vue too with my extension [2] Newsit, check it out to see how you can deploy to both Chrome and Firefox (as the extension APIs are almost standardised).

The only issue I found, was that the popup switcher doesn't show up on the new tab page, which makes it a little confusing.

[1] https://github.com/dvdvdmt/popup-tab-switcher

[2] https://github.com/benwinding/newsit/

The New Tab page is a Chrome-specific page (chrome://newtab). Extensions cannot run on these browser-specific pages, and are essentially disabled. You can "forcibly" allow extensions to run on these pages by enabling this flag: chrome://flags/#extensions-on-chrome-urls

Thanks for sharing the info about this flag, I'll definitely experiment with it.

No problem, and great extension! :)

Thanks for your advices! I will surely read your source code. It is my first time when I create an extension and I think it would be great to make it crossbrowser.

Is there a FF version tho?

Firefox has this built-in, no? You can quick-switch to tabs by using sigils in the AwesomeBar, and you can click the drop-down button in the tab bar to get a list of open tabs.

At this time it is only available for Chrome, but the project is open to contributions https://github.com/dvdvdmt/popup-tab-switcher

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