TabCtrl

Navigate through your most recently used tabs with a visual overlay (Alt+S)

TabCtrl is a visual switcher for the tabs you were just using. It is inspired by Arc’s tab switcher and by the app switcher on a laptop: hold a key, look at a short row of previews, tap to move, and release to jump. WHY OPEN TABS ARE HARD IN CHROME Chrome keeps every page in a strip across the top of the window. With a few tabs, that is enough. You can read the titles and click the one you want. A real working window does not stay that small. A doc, the page you are quoting, a dashboard, three chat threads, a pull request, and the search that started it all end up side by side. The strip squeezes each tab until the title is a few letters, or only a favicon. Pages with similar names start to look identical. You scroll the strip, hover for a tooltip, or open tab search and try to remember what the page was called. Ctrl+Tab does not solve that. By default it walks the strip from left to right, in the order the tabs happen to sit. The page you looked at a minute ago may be twenty tabs away from the one you opened this morning. Getting back means stepping through everything in between. Your laptop already avoids that for apps. On a Mac, Cmd+Tab shows the applications you used recently and switches when you let go. On Windows, Alt+Tab does the same. You are not scanning a dock of fifty icons. You are choosing among the last few places you actually were. Arc brought that idea into the browser: a momentary overlay of recent tabs, with enough of the page visible that you recognize it before you commit. Chrome does not include that overlay. The tab strip stays a long shelf, and the keyboard walks that shelf in order. TabCtrl adds the missing gesture. HOW TO USE IT Press Alt+S on a normal web page. A panel opens over the page. Your recent tabs appear as cards, each with a preview, the page title, and the site icon. The previous tab is already highlighted, the same way an app switcher starts on the previous app. Keep Alt held down. • S moves forward • Shift+S moves backward • Release Alt to open the highlighted tab • Esc closes the panel and leaves you on the current page Enter and a click also open the highlighted card. The arrow keys move through the list as well. One press of S or Shift+S moves one card. The tab you are on stays at the front of the list, so the first highlight is the page you just left. The order is most-recently-used, not the order of the tab strip. Switching does not rearrange your tabs. The strip stays as you left it. TabCtrl only decides which page comes forward. Choose 5 or 10 recent tabs from the TabCtrl icon in the toolbar. Five covers the pages you are bouncing between right now. Ten covers a wider set. New slots fill as you visit more tabs. The list is for the current window, so tabs in another window stay out of the way. WHY THE PREVIEWS MATTER A title is a weak way to recognise a page once you have several that look alike: two documents, two inboxes, several videos, a pile of documentation. TabCtrl shows a small screenshot from the last time that tab was on screen, so you can pick the page by sight. A tab you have not opened since installing TabCtrl shows a letter until you visit it once. After that, the preview is there the next time you open the switcher. WHEN IT HELPS Use it when you are moving between a document and the research behind it, between a code review and the page it changes, or between a few conversations you keep returning to. The window can hold dozens of tabs. You only look at the handful you have actually been using, and you switch with the same habit you already use for apps: hold, glance, release. WHERE IT RUNS TabCtrl works on ordinary websites. It does not run on chrome:// pages, the Chrome Web Store, or other browser-internal pages. On those pages, use Chrome’s own tab controls. Titles, addresses, icons, and previews stay in your browser. They are used to draw the switcher. TabCtrl does not send them to a server.