Wednesday 16 April 2014

Only copy tabs for a specific site when copying all tabs

There's a planned feature to allow you to select tabs that belong to a specific site when using the Copy All Tabs menu. When you specify the option to Choose Tabs from Active Window (or All Windows), you get a dialog that allows you to select the tabs you want to copy:


It's a useful feature, especially when you only want to copy some tabs.

However, when you have many tabs open, it's hard to select the ones you want. Also, which ones to copy will depend on the situation. You may want to select tabs based on the following:
  • Specific Site: All tabs belonging to a specific site should be copied, eg. www.imdb.com.
  • Tab Position: All tabs to the left/right of a specific site.
  • Relevance: Only those you feel are relevant to your current task/goal.
To help, I'm working on a feature that makes selecting all tabs that belong to a specific site much easier. Tab position may come in the future but Relevance will always be up to the user - and that's what the checkboxes are for :)



Select tabs for a specific site

The idea is to allow users to filter the list of tabs based on some filter text that will match either the contents of the Title or URL columns. The dialog will look like this (notice the Filter box at the top):



To select tabs from www.awesome-site.com, we could do the following:
  1. Click Deselect All.
  2. Type awesome in the filter box. This will filter the list to only show the 2 matches from awesome-site.
  3. Click Select All to select the 2 matches.
  4. Click OK to copy the selected tabs.
When the Filter box is cleared, then all tabs are shown again. The ones that were selected/deselected will stay selected/deselected. So the filter box only affects the visibility of the items, not the selection.

I think this allows for maximum flexibility as it will make it easy to do the inverse as well, ie. I want to select all tabs, except the ones from this particular site. And since it will match both on the Title and URL columns, you don't have to worry about which column to filter on. If you want to be specific about using the URL, then you could type the full URL in the filter box.

It could also make it easier when copying all links on a page - a similar dialog could display with all the links and then allow you to filter.

Thanks to Shogunreaper for the initial request and filtering suggestion on the Easy Copy support site. Initially I was thinking of regrouping the tree based on the site, but that would be a lot more effort than just filtering.

Hopefully this will make it into Easy Copy 2.3.0.

1 comment:

  1. After a bit of a hitch, the feature has been submitted to Firefox for review. It took longer than expected because of the frustrating XUL tree. Hopefully I'll be doing a post (or two) on some of its issues and how to handle them - to help others and to vent a little as well... :)

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