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Tree Style Tab (aka TST)

Build Status

This is a Firefox add-on which provides the ability to operate tabs as "tree".

New tabs opened from the current tab are automatically organized as "children" of the current. Such "branches" are easily folded (collapsed) by clicking on down on the arrow shown in the "parent" tab, so you don't need to suffer from too many visible tabs anymore. If you want, you can restructure the tree via drag and drop.

  • Such a tree of tabs will behave like a visual browsing history for you. For example, if you see a list of search results for a topic, you'll open each search result link in new child tab. For more details you'll also open more descendant tabs from them. You'll easily dig and dig deeply, without losing your browsing trail - if you want to go back to the original search result, you just have to switch to the "root" tab.
  • Moreover, you'll treat a tree of tabs just as "grouped tabs" for similar topics.

Anyway this addon just provide uncolored "tree" feature. Please enjoy as you like!

Release builds

Development builds

There is an automated build based on the latest source code. Builds for each commit are avilable at "Artifacts" of the CI/CD action.

It is not signed, so you need to load it by non-regular way. (Please click this section to see instructions.)

There are two methods to try them in your environment:

  • Go to about:debugging and click "Load Temporary Add-on" button, then choose the downloaded file. The development build will be loaded and active until you restart your Firefox.
  • If you want to try it as a regular addon instead of a temporary addon, you need to use Nightly instead of the stable Firefox or Firefox beta. On Nightly, go to about:config and set xpinstall.signatures.required to false. Then you will be able to install such an unsigned addon.

Also, you can build a custom development build locally. For example, here are the steps to build an XPI on Ubuntu (native, or WSL on Windows 10):

$ sudo apt install git nodejs npm
$ git clone --recursive https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab.git
$ cd treestyletab/webextensions
$ make

Steps to build a specific revision (for example bb467286d58b3da90fd1b2e6ee8a8016e3377b97):

$ cd treestyletab/webextensions
$ git checkout bb467286d58b3da90fd1b2e6ee8a8016e3377b97
$ git submodule update
$ make

Then you will see new .xpi files in the current directory. You can install such a development build via about:debugging. Click the Load Temporary Add-on button and choose treestyletab/manifest.json or a built .xpi file.

Addons that extend TST

TST provides an API for other addons. Some addons provide extended behavior to TST's sidebar panel:

Similar projects

There are some similar project by someone not me providing similar features:

If you have any request, proposal, or unexpected trouble from bugs?

All feedbacks are handled as GitHub issues. But please read FAQ below, before you post any new feature request.

Basics

  • TST is basically designed to be used as an permanently-shown tab management UI, an alternative of Firefox's native tab bar.
    • To avoid users' confusion, TST respects Firefox's built-in behavior and features around the tab bar - tab context menu, gestures, and so on.
  • And, of course TST is designed to work with "tree of tabs".
    • TST's tree is designed to work as an extended memory for your brain. To satisfy this concept, TST is designed to guess relation of tabs automatically, from the context.
    • Better usability around ungrouped flat tabs in a vertical tab bar is out of purpose.

Any feature request unrelated to these points may be rejected, even if many people love it. For example: session management, search field, detailed focus control of tabs, and so on.

Instead of adding more built-in features, I hope to make TST compatible with other tab related addons. If it is required for more better compatibility I add public APIs for other addons, and actually there are some implementations using this API.

If you need any new API, please file API proposals to the issue tracker.

FAQ / frequently rejected requests/proposals

Other browsers support

Appearance

  • How to hide the top tab bar (horizontal tab strip)?

    As a workaround, you need to do it by creating a userChrome.css. But please remind that such an usage is not recommended by the original author of TST, because TST doesn't cover full features of the native tabs due to restrictions of WebExtensions API so some tab features become inaccessible.

  • How to apply GTK+ theme color on Linux?

    Due to restrictions from Firefox itself, TST can't apply GTK+ theme color to its appearance by default. If you hope to see TST's UI with colors matching to other parts of Firefox, you need to configure Firefox and TST as:

    • Firefox's about:config
      • widget.content.allow-gtk-dark-theme=true (not default)
      • widget.content.gtk-theme-override=unset (default)
    • TST's options (pattern 1, using "Plain" theme)
      • "Appearance" => "Theme" => "Plain" (default)
      • "Advanced" => "Extra style rules..." => paste these lines (not default)
      • "Development" => "Color scheme" => "System Color" (default)
    • TST's options (pattern 2, using less extra style rules)
      • "Appearance" => "Theme" => "High Contrast" (not default)
      • "Advanced" => "Extra style rules..." => no active style rule (default)
      • "Development" => "Color scheme" => "System Color" (default)

    For more details, please see also the discussions in the issue #2667.

Feature requests

  • Support for horizontal tab bar

    It is impossible. TST 2.0 and later are implemented as just a sidebar panel, so there is no chance to provide horizontal version.

  • Better support for non-indented vertical tabs

    It is out of purposes of "Tree" Style Tabs. I recommend you to use other addons providing vertical tab bar without tree instead.

  • Better context menu on tabs

    Full featured, expanded outside of the sidebar, accesskeys, and so on, is available on Firefox 64 and later.

    However, please note that some features are still unavailable due to restrictions of WebExtensions API, for example "Send Tab to Device".

  • I don't need automatically organized tree, instead I just want to organize tree by myself

    You can deactivate TST's automatic tree organizing behaviors, by some secret preferences:

    1. Go to TST's configuration.
    2. "Development" section.
    3. Turn on the checkbox "Debug mode". Then all internal configurations are listed.
    4. Turn off the checkbox "autoAttach".
    5. Turn off the checkbox "syncParentTabAndOpenerTab".
    6. Turn on the checkbox "Debug mode". Then all internal configurations are listed.

    After that TST never attach new tabs to existing tree automatically.

    If you want to drag multiple tabs at once to organize tree, Shift/Ctrl-click to select multiple tabs (and Multiple Tab Handler for more feature) will help you.

  • Adding new minor (trivial) options more and more

    I won't increase number of configurations inifinitely, instead I hope to reduce them. High customizability for details of features is out of TST's purpose. I want to provide only very required options which are truly un-omitable. Too many optional features would kill this project, because they would cloud the important concept of TST and would bring together people who don't like my core vision about TST. Instead, sorry but please fork this project and modify it for your use case.

  • Adding new options to control where new tabs are opened from links or bookmarks

    In most cases - subjectively 99%, new tabs from links may be related to the source tab, and tabs from bookmarks may not be related to the current tab. For other rare cases - if you want to open the link in new sibling tab, or you want to open a bookmark as a child tab of the current, then you can do it by dragging a link or bookmark and drop it onto a tab or between tabs. Natural operations for GUI objects shoud be optimized for most major usecases.

    Too high customizability for such rare usecases would make just you happy, but others including me won't - they are just confused that "why are there so many choices to make?"

  • Adding new context menu command to go to the options page

    Do you use the toolbar button of TST itself? Then you can go to TST's options page directly from the context menu on the button. Firefox provides a "Manage Extension" command globally at the context menu on toolbar buttons provided by addons. Moreover, TST privately provides more commands like the options dialog at the menu for a shortcut.

    On the other hand, I'm negative to provide a command like "TST Options" at the context menu on tabs, with some reasons:

    • The command is fundamentally unrelated to the context: "what command do you want to invoke for the tab?"
    • If you need to change TST's options too frequently on your daily use, something wrong. For example, a failure auto-detection of TST for your action's context. I believe that such a problem should be fixed on TST side like improvements of auto-detection, instead of providing easy way for workaround.

    If you really need to access TST's options page very frequently due to some reasons, as a workaround you can bookmark the page with the URL ext+treestyletab:options. It allows you to open the options page in a tab.

  • How to customize tab context menu?

    You can do it with the userChrome.css. There are some instructions about activatiton of the userChrome.css on recent versions of Firefox and style rules to hide specific context menu items.

    I have no plan to add configuration UI for menu items cited from Firefox's native tab context menu. Here are some my comments describing reasons of this decision.

  • Auto hide of the sidebar

    Due to limitations of WebExtensions APIs, it is impossible. (But there is a workaround based on userChrome.css.)

    WebExtensions only allows to toggle visibility of the sidebar for limited keyboard shortcuts or the toolbar button. Other arbitrary timing are disallowed, including mouseover and long-press of a key.

  • I want to use "Bookmarks" sidebar panel parallelly with TST's tabs

    It is currently impossible due to the bug 1328776 (Provide ability to show multiple sidebar contents parallelly). But there are some workarounds:

    • TST Bookmarks Subpanel is now available for TST 3.1.0 and later. It provides a cloned version of the "Bookmarks" sidebar panel below TST's tabs.
    • Aggregate Tabs to Main Window may help you to use Firefox's multiple windows for each purpose: "an window for a sidebar panel" and "an window for browsing tabs". Such windows should behave like virtual multiple sidebar panels.
  • High-power management of tree, like sorting child tabs, auto-modification of tree, renaming of tabs, and so on

    I believe that generally "tree of tabs should be a visualized history of web browsing", because they are built on relations where you came from. Possibly such a tree is facially chaotic, but it just mirrors your actual footmarks, so you'll easily find out where is the target tab based on a map in your mind. Moreover, those relations themselves may let you recall forgotten idea you thought while you were browsing those tabs.

    On the other hand, sorted tabs based on URLs or something will be beautiful - but that's all. Such sorted tabs won't help me - I'm very forgetful. In other words, I just need something which memorizes my chaotic mind as-is.

    By the way, my another addon Multiple Tab Handler will help you if you frequently modify tree by drag and drop. It provides ability to select multiple tabs by Ctrl-Click or Shift-Click and you can drag selected tabs at once.

  • Configuration UI to change appearance of tabs in the vertical tab bar, for example, color, height, visibility of the scrollbar, transparency of tabs, and so on

    There is a plan to implement an input field to write custom CSS rules, so it will work like as userChrome.css. See the code snippets and details of inspection for the sidebar contents.

Troubles, unexpected behaviors

  • TST suddenly became not working! No reaction on the sidebar!
    1. Please try closing the sidebar and reopen it again, to reload the sidebar presentation module of TST. TST may work again if the trouble is due to a disconnection between TST's internal modules.
    2. If reopening the sidebar doesn't solve the problem, try disabling and re-enabling TST on the add-ons manager, to reload TST completely. TST may work again if the trouble is due to something broken internal status of TST itself.
    3. If both reopening and reloading don't solve the problem, restart Firefox please. If the trouble is due to something problems happening in a deeply low layer, we cannot recover the normal status without restarting of Firefox.
  • I cannot drop tabs to the bookmarks toolbar to create bookmarks. (#2033)

    In short: shift-dragging of tabs will allow you to drop tabs to the bookmarks toolbar. Otherwise TST Bookmarks Subpanel possibly helps you.

    From a change introduced at the bug 1453153 (affects on Firefox 63 and later), now Firefox doesn't allow addons to provide ability to do "creating bookmarks (or links) by drag and drop of tabs" and "detach a tab to a new window by dropping it outside of the window" in same time - those functionailities are quite exclusive. (For more technical details, see my comment at the issue #2033.)

    Thus, now TST provides two different effects to gestures:

    • Dragging tabs to out of the tab bar: detach dropped tabs to a new window. You cannot drop tabs to the bookmark toolbar.
    • Shift-dragging tabs to out of the tab bar: create links to the desktop from dropped tabs. You can drop tabs to the bookmark toolbar to create bookmarks.

    You can switch these behaviors. Please go to the "Drag and Drop" section of TST's options page. (By the way, TST Bookmarks Subpanel's small Bookmarks panel always accept drag and drop of TST's tree without such modifier keys.)

    For more preference, you can use a small drag handles with a helper addon: they will appear when the cursor is hovering on left edge (or right edge for inverted appearance) of a tab for a while. You can start dragging of the tab from one of handles, with specified effect for each without any modifier key.

  • New tab is not opened with expected position and container, when it is opened as a blank tab instead of the default new tab page. (#2176)

    This is a known issue and hard (or impossible) to be fixed on TST, due to restrictions of WebExtensions API. TST cannot detect "a new blank tab is intentionally opened by the user with the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-T", because all new tabs are initially opened with the about:blank URL even if you open a new tab from a link. Sadly there is no more hint to detect the context how a new tab is opened by you.

    For a workaround, you can define a custom shortcut to open a new blank tab with TST's settings: assigning something shortcut for the command "Open a new tab: Child Tab" at the add-ons manager. Go to about:addons => click the gear button => "Manage Extension Shortcuts" => "Tree Style Tab" => "Show 40 More" => "Open a new tab: Child Tab" => set something shortcut like Ctrl+Alt+T, then you'll get a child tab as expected with the shortcut instead of the default Ctrl-T.

Other topics

  • How to donate to this project?

    Thanks, but sorry, I have no plan about any donation from some reasons. The biggest reason is: because I want to keep me as the prime user of this project. I want to keep having a privilege to say "no" about requests that do not match my vision. My hands are already full to maintain this addon for my use case. (Of course I know that donation is not payment, but I'm afraid that I would think about voices from people who did donation more seriously and it would unconsciously conflict with my policies.)

    And, I'm afraid of social undermining also.

    Any other contribution to this project is welcome - translation, debugging, triaging of issues, and more. If you have fixed a bug you met, please send a pull request - I'll merge it. If you have different plans about TST, please fork this project freely for your purpose, if needed.

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Tree Style Tab, Show tabs like a tree.

piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/treestyletab/

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