[xmonad] Dealing with large amounts of pages in a common web browser

[Troels Henriksen]

Ben Boeckel <mathstuf at gmail.com> writes:

>> The nice thing about surf is that it opens a window per page, which
>> means that they are all visible to xmonad, and navigable through things
>> like GridSelect, which would not be the case if I simply had two dozen
>> tabs open in Firefox.  However, sometimes tabs are nice - specifically,
>> it's practical to use CTRL-clicking to open new pages in the background.
>>
>> Do you have any suggestions on how to deal with this?  Some combination
>> of Firefox hacks and xmonad layouts?  How do you set up your browsers?
>
> Personally, I just drag Firefox tabs around as needed. As for uzbl, I
> use a mix of Tall, TwoPane, and Full layouts to manage lots of windows
> depending on the case. Tall is used by default, TwoPane when I'm going
> through a list of things (bug tracker, emails, images, etc.), and Full
> for focusing on a single window.

This makes it hard to deal with having two dozen tabs open across
several different windows, however.  It is annoying, because in xmonad
this is already a solved problem for windows...

I have come to the hypothesis that the best solution is to write a
Firefox hack/extension that allows GridSelect[0] to present the Firefox
tabs as well as windows, and if a tab is selected, not just select the
Firefox window, but also make it focus that tab.  Too bad I don't really
know anything about writing Firefox extensions (let alone one that can
communicate with other processes), but I guess it is not too late to
learn.

[0]: Well, really a personal fork called gsmenu:
http://sigkill.dk/pub/configs/xmonad/lib/GSMenuPick.hs

-- 
\  Troels
/\ Henriksen