Show HN: Web browser to help programmers think clearly

Re:Show HN: Web browser to help programmers think clearly by anigbrowl on Tuesday September 07, 2021 @07:28PM (#28451093)

I've been griping about the tedium of trying to organize tabs (and to a lesser extent bookmarks) for a long time. I typically have hundreds of tabs open and my sanity maintenance method is to keep their number under 256. They're somewhat organized with tab groups but the overhead of managing them is a huge pain point for me. So the visual categorization and search looks like a huge win. I don't care that much about the other stuff tbh :)

Visual organizational tools are very important to me. Even if I'm in the IDE and thinking in code, when I jump tot eh browser for something I want the experience to visual and low-friction, so I don't have to push brower things onto my mental stack, which will slow me down when I want to switch back to the IDE.

I'm very good at remembering where things are, I can pick up a book I haven't touched in months and remember the page I was on, or the last sentence I read to find my place with a few seconds. On the other hand, large scale sorting and rearranging tasks are miserable drudgery so I have a lot of stacks and my bookshelves are, ah, suboptimal.

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Re:Show HN: Web browser to help programmers think clearly by wpietri on Tuesday September 07, 2021 @08:34PM (#28451548)

I'm not sure if this is helpful to you, but at some point I realized that I was using "open tab" to represent many different things. Once I started naming the uses, I realized that I could shift them to use-related systems. E.g., a "to read" tab gets fed to Instapaper and closed. a "to do" tab ends up on a relevant Kanban board. A "I might want to be able to find this again" tab goes into Pinboard. Tabs that are basically apps I want to keep open get turned into apps.

That, combined with relatively small units of work (most of my kanban cards are in the 0.25-2.0 day range) means that I can just go on tab closing sprees frequently.

I ended up liking this approach because having a zillion open tabs introduces a subtle stress and anxiety that's sort of like when I visit a hoarder.

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Re:Show HN: Web browser to help programmers think clearly by jinto36 on Friday September 10, 2021 @07:58PM (#28488205)

I like the idea of de-convoluting purpose from the information-pile, and indeed there is some weight associated with the thousand-something tabs I have open across multiple computers because they're all "open loops" in some form or another. When I try to deal with it, I often feel resistance to relying on cloud-based services, since it takes a while to get everything you want into that system, and there's the "what-if" questions about service longevity and if they allow exporting complete backups of the data you put in, etc. Certainly doing nothing about it doesn't help though. I do at least make sure my browser application data folders are part of my file-level backups.

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Re:Show HN: Web browser to help programmers think clearly by CRConrad on Thursday September 09, 2021 @08:08PM (#28476246)

> I ended up liking this approach because having a zillion open tabs introduces a subtle stress and anxiety that's sort of like when I visit a hoarder.

Sort of like when I'm being a hoarder, for me... :-( Gotta try and learn something like your approach. (I'll do that as soon as I can get around to it, i.e. when I'm done with all the procrastinating that's piling up on my to-do lists.)

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