Working with tabs

Organize Chrome tabs by project

Everyone who works on more than one thing in one browser ends up solving this. Here are the three usual answers, what each one actually costs, and the part none of them covers.

1. A window per project

The obvious one, and it works until there are four windows. Then the taskbar is the problem instead of the tab strip, ⌘` cycles through all of them, and if Chrome is set to continue where you left off, a restart reopens every window at once — which is the state you were trying to avoid.

2. Tab groups

Chrome's own answer, and a good one: name a group, give it a color, collapse it so only the name shows. The tabs stay open, which is the point — the group is tidy, the window is not shorter, and a project you are not working on this week is still in front of you.

How SwitchCue and tab groups fit together — it keeps the groups you made rather than replacing them.

3. Bookmark the lot and close it

This is the only one that genuinely clears the window. A folder of twelve bookmarks reopens twelve pages, and the page you were reading is not marked. The tabs came back; the thread did not.

The part all three miss

Every approach above organizes what is open. None of them holds what you were about to do — and that is the expensive half. Coming back to a project is not "which tabs were these", it is "what was I in the middle of", and the tabs are only a clue to it.

That is the whole idea behind SwitchCue: a project's tabs are saved together with one line about the next step. Switching closes one project's tabs, reopens the other's, and puts the line back on screen with the page you were last on named underneath it.

What that looks like

Save the tabs you have open as a Workspace and give it a name. Before you switch away, write one line — Send Dana the revised estimate before 3pm. The tabs close. When you come back, they reopen and the line is waiting, with the page you were last on named under it when SwitchCue knows it.

Twenty-five seconds of it, with no narration, or how it works across several clients.