Select Tabs Autor: Lionel Wong

Adds a submenu of commands in the tab, link and selected-text context/right-click menus.

✂️ You can add and remove commands to and from the tab context menu in Options/Preferences, allowing you to prune the submenu to your liking. (For example, some commands like Add Left/Right, Trail Left/Right and Clear are more useful as keyboard shortcuts than menu commands.)

⌨️ You can assign keyboard shortcuts to tab context commands, giving you a keyboard-driven way to invoke them on the current tab. On the about:addons page, click the ⚙️ button → Manage Extension Shortcuts, and look for the Select Tabs section.

⚡ If your operating system supports access keys (i.e. Windows and Linux), tapping the underlined letters visible in context menu items is a quick way to choose them via keyboard. Can be modified in Options/Preferences. See also "Context menu related" tips below.

Full list of commands are as follows (All available when right-clicking a tab, unless otherwise specified):

Text search:

• With Link Text — Select tabs with a title or url containing the target link text. (Only available when right-clicking a link)
• With "(Selected Text)" — Select tabs with a title or url containing the selected text. (Only available when right-clicking a text selection)

URL-based:

• Duplicates — Select tabs sharing the same url as the target tab or link. (Also available when right-clicking a link)
• Same Site — Select all tabs sharing the same website domain and subdomain as the target tab or link. Note for example, www.wikipedia.org and en.wikipedia.org have different subdomains and would not get selected together. (Also available when right-clicking a link)
• Same Site Cluster — Select only a group of neighbouring same site tabs around the target tab.
• Same Site and Descendants — Select same site tabs, and all their descendants regardless of website.

Tab tree:

• Descendants — Select the target tab and its descendants i.e. its child tabs, and their children, and so on. A child tab is a tab that was opened from the target tab.
• Parent — Select the tab that the target tab was opened from, if it exists.
• Parent and Descendants — Select the target tab's parent and all its descendants (naturally including the target tab). If there is no parent, select the target tab and its descendants.
• Siblings — Select the target tab and its siblings (tabs with a common parent). If the target tab has no parent, all parentless tabs end up selected.
• Siblings and Descendants — Select the target tab, its siblings, and all their descendants. If the target tab has no parent, all tabs end up selected.

Directional:

• To the Start — Select the target tab and all tabs to its left.
• To the End — Select the target tab and all tabs to its right.
• Add Left — Add to the current selection a tab to its left.
• Add Right — Add to the current selection a tab to its right.
• Trail Left — Switch focus to the left of the target tab. If the target tab is rightmost of the current selection, it shrinks by one tab. Otherwise it grows by one tab, leaving behind a selection "trail".
• Trail Right — Switch focus to the right of the target tab. If the target tab is leftmost of the current selection, it shrinks by one tab. Otherwise it grows by one tab, leaving behind a selection "trail".

Temporal:

• Accessed in the Past Hour — Select tabs opened or viewed in the past hour.
• Accessed in the Past 24 Hours — Select tabs opened or viewed in the past 24 hours.
• Accessed Today — Select tabs opened or viewed today (since midnight).
• Accessed Yesterday — Select tabs opened or last viewed yesterday (excludes any viewed today).

Miscellaneous:

• All — Select all tabs.
• Clear — Deselect all tabs that are not the current tab.
• Invert — Deselect selected tabs and select all other tabs.

Notes on selection behaviour

Hopefully these are sensible and intuitive enough that you don't really have to think about them in regular usage.

• Selections usually exclude pinned tabs, except:
  
  1. when the target is a pinned tab
  2. with the Invert command, when the original selection included a pinned tab
  3. with a Parent-seeking command
  4. with a single-additive command (Add/Trail)
• Within a selection, the tab that receives focus is, in order of priority:
  
  1. If using a Parent-seeking command: the parent tab
  2. If using a Trail command: adjacent to the currently focused tab
  3. The currently focused tab (The ideal; Select Tabs will most prefer to keep tab focus unchanged)
  4. The target tab
  5. The leftmost selected tab

🥰 Grab "tab trees" with or without Tree Style Tabs, Sidebery, et al.

Whether you are a user of a visual "tab tree" extension or not, Select Tabs can be a lightweight companion or even substitute for showing implicit tab relationships, via the parent/descendant/sibling commands.

Note: By default, tab relationships do not survive tabs/windows/the browser being closed. Most tab tree extensions remedy this though.


😎 Pro tips

General

• How to manually select (and deselect) multiple tabs:
  
  • Ctrl+click (or Cmd+click) a tab to add it to (or remove it from) a selection.
  • Shift+click a tab to select all tabs between it and the current tab, inclusive.
• Select Tabs → Duplicates is more effective with a url cleaning extension installed, which removes unnecessary tracking parameters that would mess with duplicate-matching.

Context menu related

• To see how many tabs are currently selected, right-click a selected tab to find certain menu items that display the count e.g. Send 5 Tabs to Device, Close 5 Tabs.
• On Windows and Linux, every Select Tabs menu item has an access key, indicated by an underlined letter. For example, to access Select Tabs → To the End while the tab context menu is open, press S (more than once if other menu items also share this key) and then E.
• Can't see some of your selected tabs scatterred all over an overflowing tab bar? Gather them in one place: right-click one of them and Move Tabs → Move to Start (V S), or Move Tabs → Move to End (V E).
  
  • Alternatively Move Tabs → Move to New Window (V W), or drag them off the tab bar for the same effect.
• Select Tabs makes tab context menu items Close Multiple Tabs and Select All Tabs practically redundant. Why not get rid of them?
• Shift+click a menu command to add the new selection to the existing one.

Keyboard related

If you like using Select Tabs via keyboard shortcuts, here are some keyboard-driven tab navigation tips:

• Ctrl+1 all the way to Ctrl+8 (or Cmd+1..8) switches to the first to eighth tab.
• Ctrl+9 switches to the last tab.
• If you've enabled "Ctrl+Tab cycles through tabs in recently used order" in your browser settings:
  
  • Ctrl+Tab to switch to the previously seen tab. If you hold down Ctrl you get thumbnails of recent tabs you can Tab through.
  • Ctrl+Shift+Tab opens the tab list menu. Unfortunately this helpful shortcut is not available without this browser setting on.
  Otherwise: Ctrl+Tab to switch to the next tab on the right, Ctrl+Shift+Tab to the previous tab on the left.
  
• Manually targeting tabs is not straightforward. Alt+D, Ctrl+L (or Cmd+L) or F6 to focus on the address bar, then Shift+Tab a few times until a tab receives focus. Then use Left/Right arrows to traverse the tab bar.
  
  • Another way to get focus on the tab bar is to click just above the last focusable item on a page (e.g. a link, button, input field) and then press Tab enough times until the current tab has focus.