| Is there a reason you can't already do this with windows (which are a visual grouping of tabs)? You're right that cycling through tabs and making individual decisions on closing each one has a high cognitive load. Closing an entire window is much easier. A while ago I realized this, and started to front-load that cognitive effort and make sure that the "root" of each "subject" gets opened in a new window (or at least detached early enough once I realized that I was branching off into a new subject). An example of the root of a subject could be an item in an issue tracker, and that window could also contain tabs for code search windows, Google searches on that topic, Stack Overflow answers, etc. Once I'm done fixing the bug, I just close the entire window/subject/group, without thinking about each individual tab. The front page of HN is also usually the root of a subject. I'll open tabs for articles and comment pages, and then close the whole window once I'm done with my break and want to go back to work. If there's something particularly interesting that I want to save for later, I'll detach that tab and close the rest. For the C++/RAII people, this is kind of like making sure that every object has an owner, and that memory is freed when those objects go out of scope. This is a lot easier than manually doing a mark-and-sweep over all your tabs :) |