[jbstack]

Do you really need hundreds of open tabs though? To me this suggests a workflow issue rather than a tab management problem.

I only keep tabs open that I'm actively working on right now (or am imminently about to switch back to). I regularly close tabs (and windows for that matter) that are only open because I forgot about them, or that I might use again but not until hours or days later. If I need them later I just open them again.

For me, having hundreds of things open at once just creates clutter that makes it harder to focus.

[ta8903]

I don't know, it works for me.

Using Sidebery panes and treestyle tabs makes it really easy to organize your tabs, I have a tree with all my tasks with relevant documentation or subtasks under each task, and I have a separate panes with all the documentation I refer constantly at the top and everything I'm reading right now at the bottom. I definitely have a lot of tabs I opened to read and never closed, but that doesn't matter since everything is arranged in an approximation of a 2D space, I still know where to look for something specific. I'm sure you feel this is weird because you've never used a tree-style tab manager, but personally I can't go back to a regular browsing setup.

[jbstack]

You've convinced me enough to give it a try.

I think I'd still maintain a conceptual difference between sites that are source material (e.g. documentation) or apps (e.g. Google Translate), and those that are just for browsing (e.g. news, blogs) and are more ephemeral (I may read it now, or keep it for later, but either way I'll be done with it).

You'd open a PDF, Word document, or app in its own window which you'd manage with your DE / WM. To me it feels like a bit of an anti-pattern to have some of this type of content handled by my WM, and others by a tree-style tab manager, when they are the same "type" of content. I want to be able to press the same keyboard shortcut to switch to my documentation whether it happens to be a PDF or a website.

On the other hand, there isn't anything else really equivalent to browsing-type content, so the tree-style tab manger feels more natural to me there.