IIRC one of the things they did well that could work here is batch control of tabs by dragging across them - you could click on a close or pin button, then drag vertically across other tabs to apply that action - it made handling the glut ever-spawning tabs very easy
- a happy chrome user
My browsing has become so much more enjoyable. Also, since it’s almost the same as Safari, great resource management, great gestures, great performance. Definitely recommended
I was planning to build it with ultralig.ht, but I'm not 100% sure if it's ready for it. But since most of the content I'm interested in for research is textual/reader mode, and the rest can be viewed with yt-dlp, I think it can render them and it seems the lightest weight. Otherwise it's webkit or servo that I could think of for this.
Good to know there's interest in this.
Been using the grouping and pinning feature in chrome for a bit then saving the groups i care about to try to emulate this behavior, but still a long way off from ideal; the one dimension of tabs at the top level means the UI gets crowded quickly.
Had the tree-style tabs extension for a bit but didn't love its interface and found it to be more trouble than it was worth.
And I strongly suggest that you contact Kay Xu <[email protected]>, who is doing research on sensemaking [1] [2] and berrypicking [3], I think he is currently working on newer and better version of his approach with browser extensions (as opposed to a separate renderer), and you both would benefit from collaboration.
[1] https://vis4sense.github.io/sensemap/paper.pdf
[2] https://vis4sense.github.io/sensemap/
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20080112091521/http://www.gseis....
Also [The old version of SenseMap is no longer being maintained. A new version called HistoryMap is currently under development ] > site is dead .
Last time I had contact with them, they were exploring using Plasmo [1] as building block for the extension, instead of doing everything vanilla as they did in the 1st version, which would offer cross-browser support out of the box.
But meanwhile, you can check the code [2] and add the FF manifest yourself to try it out.
But in the meantime (my current rabbit holing technology being a text file in a side window), I'm more than happy to try out everyone else's!
I need to know how this guy will escape the curse of reimplementing a less-VR version of XanaduSpace over HTTPS. Will search his RSS.
Each new search term should open a new results panel, with space for the source code on top, and a list of hits at the bottom. Results panels are in an infinite horizontal row.
Am I the only one who regularly ends up a browsing session with 300 tabs? This feels like a feature I'd overuse, and which would only make my life much worse.
OTOH, being able to quickly go back to the junction where I left the path I was supposed to follow, is invaluable too.
In vim, I also never got my head around the undo-branching feature. I understand it, but fail to use it in practice. I guess my ADHD brain can handle linear history better than a branching history.
…you know, in case I, uh, want to continue to work through them some other day... :|
I think it would be even more helpful if I could easily tag things along the way, and then quickly search both my tags and content of seen pages. Confidence I could find something again would make it easier for me to close tabs.
For what it's worth, as a fellow ADHD person, these days I regularly go on tab-closing sweeps (generally at some related event, like starting or stopping work for the day or when starting or finishing a task). I try to have one window per ongoing task, and then find places for the other tabs. E.g., if a task represents or is related to a possible to-do, I'll put in in my kanban board. If it's a to-read, it goes to instapaper. If I just thought it was interesting and might want it again, I'll put a line in my LogSeq journal with a short description. The general theory being that if I'm not just hoarding, the I'm saving a tab for a reason, so I should articulate the reason and put the tab somewhere I'll find it again when the the time is right.
You add bookmarks/RSS feeds or whatever, run
offpunk --sync
offpunk
tour (or t)
Everything is kept offline for further usage.
> As an aside, I also use this technique for navigating code with Vim, where a single shortcut goes to a definition of a function in a new pane
I was intrigued by this, and searched the author's github for their .vim. This is how they do that:
nnoremap gF <c-w>vgF
https://github.com/szymonkaliski/dotfiles/blob/357fc7c76ca86...
and
nnoremap <silent>gD :call CocActionAsync('jumpDefinition', 'vsplit')<cr>
https://github.com/szymonkaliski/dotfiles/blob/357fc7c76ca86...
---
Edit: This is what I ended up with, lua, nvim: `buf_set_keymap('n', 'gds', '<c-w>v<cmd>lua vim.lsp.buf.definition()<CR>', opts)`
I made it a different map from the normal gd, so that I can choose to open in a new split or just jump to the one in my current window - I don't want a new split if e.g. a variable is define just 20 lines above my current one.
A browser should behave just like browsing documents, we can go back and forth, each "view" should be cachable and savable, not the 20MB main.min.js SPA crap!
It also had full text searching of the contents of the page and also worked as a browser history.
I used it for a few years.
The real solution I saw in a roomful of butcher paper tucked in cabinets in the basement of a really dedicated guy who had a learning disability. He went through textbooks and had to come up with his own special syntax in order to comprehend the text by rearranging the contents on these giant rolls effectively making a hybrid between a mind map and a zui.
He had a "linking" idea that involved an indexing system where you'd get another roll of paper out of the cabinet earmarked with labels and then unrolled it to the "linked" region. Then he'd fold it back on a table and have them both side by side.
The general applicability was immediately apparent. I worked on it as a new way to browse the web over 10 years ago for a few months but then didn't stick with it.
I keep telling myself I'll work more on it but you know, anxiety and depression sucks. You can even use llms to do smart ontological labeling now.
The pieces are right fucking there. All I need to do is pick them up.
Sounds great, please so more - and tell others.
I think some kind of automated OWL system using all the modern magic that huggingface has to offer will produce better than trash results and is the way to go.
We're really just tokenizing and lexing here and it's just a matter of putting in the hours and getting people on board.
Some of my general problem is I don't care about money. I'm in this field to build a better future, not so I could personally live extravagantly. Benevolence, however, is not how society is organized.
This only sounds wacky because it's new. Let's put it this way. Our rules for the written word doesn't really go high up in the abstraction. In English we have a character set that serves as phonetic and a bit of a fuzzy etymology history and that's it.
We don't arrange the words in space differently depending on the expressed intent. There's no squares, circles or triangles that the words enfold upon. Lines or arrows are not part of the writing system.
But if you look at how students take notes, you'll invariably find many invent their own extensions to accommodate for this oversight. Shapes, colors, squiggles, and other affectations carry semantic weight. It's been invented and reinvented millions of times.
I've asked people whenever I see it in the past 10 years or so and almost nobody realizes they invented their own system. They are just doing "what makes sense to them". And there's lots of commonalities. People reinvent the same things.
Semiotics is a natural tool of expression, comprehension and understanding. The wall between it and the written word is an artificial construct that people naturally ignore in their personal writings. I hear people think others won't be able to understand their notes - it's just for them. You'd be surprised how universal these linguistic extensions actually are.
This interaction is an important tool in expressing the natures of corpi transclusions on the project we call the web. We've got the pixels to do it now. Let's go!
Anyways. I'm sure this reads like I'm a nutjob. And yes, I've talked to Ted Nelson about this. He doesn't seem to get it. My email is in my profile if you're interested.
The most important aspect to succeeding here is keeping it open, collaborative and free. This cannot succeed as a private project
A bit more seriously, it can be really useful to have a graph of ArXiv tabs instead of a linear range of tabs, this can be very handy when doing a dive in scientific literature.
Add the ability to add notation, ratings, etc... to that knowledge in a structure, and I think you've got a winner.
Oh.. and store EVERYTHING required to show the page, or save a view of it that's independent of the live internet... that's the other key part of the Memex.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m...
FF + sideberry for every day use and rabbit holing.
I want this in my regular browser (you ear me Mozilla && Servo devs?!)
This is that but next level, many thanks for sharing your work.
Following rabbit holes, if the trail is preserved, turns my ADHD from inconvenient distraction into a research superpower.
Creates rabbit-holing browser, gets distracted....
All jokes aside, the description of the Vim functionality reminds me of the Whisper browser for Squeak, that had something of a depth-oriented SmalltalkBrowser to avoid the inevitable proliferation of windows in the normal course of things. Interesting that enough functionality for reorienting source browsing like that in Vim is about two lines of config. But, of course, the Whisper browser had stacking of things as well as sideways browsing, and new UI.
It kept track of all tab opens & showed it in a node structure.
Screenshot: https://github.com/Taborniki/node-search/blob/pre-alfa/demo....
It looks really cool and clean!
- Tree Style Tabs: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta... (more simplistic, no session saving functionality)
- Tree Tabs: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-tabs (more complex, can also save sessions, but incompatible with some other add-ons and not evaluated for security by Mozilla)
Neither rearrange tabs in the window, just offer an alternate tree listing of open tabs.
I can see a neat way of doing this with Niri[0] and its recent IPC layout interface, combined with an extension like URL in Title[1] to expose the full window URL to the wm. Someone may need to hold my beer
[0]: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri [1]: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/url-in-title/ignpac...
OP's browser and gingko mashed up together would be the perfect thing -- find/explore/learn, annotate, synthesize, organize, and combine into a finished thing, be it a reference or a proof.
PS: awesome idea!
And a column mode for Tree Style Tabs in Firefox (or Orion/Servo/etc)
Two features to help with rabbit holing, both automatic:
1. Close tabs that are not used for the ongoing topic
2. Group the browsing history by topic so that users can go back and review their research journey
Here's the website: https://www.skipper.co/
I shared a preview on Twitter ↗, to a surprisingly overwhelming response, but I got distracted with other things and never got back to the project.Firefox‘s history could definitely use a remake, I find it pretty close to useless currently.
But I am vague about Xanadu's browser as I only seen it as a brief flash in Werner Herzog's Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World.
Nice write-up here: https://www.menimagerie.com/manuscripts/2018/6/9/v-douglas-h...
Already done
As Nyxt is for browsers what Emacs is for editors, you can put crazy stuff on it with very little.
Similarly to OP and many other like-minded commenters, I've also built an interface for rabbit-holing [0]. This is a 10 year old, purely JS+CSS solution you can open in your browser. It's limited to Wikipedia and its UI seems broken after Wikipedia's style updates, but nevertheless wanted to share the source code [1] for anyone who's interested
[0] https://amadeusw.com/WikiDive/ [1] https://github.com/AmadeusW/WikiDive