Mouseless interface for toggling sessions

[m2habert]

Tabs aside is pretty much perfect for my needs... The only thing lacking, in my humble hateful of the mouse opinion, would be a shortcut interface intended to toggle the sessions between "set aside" and "restore".

An option could be something similar to hints from Vimperator / Tridactyl : a third shortcut would populate the session list with numbers for each session. User press number x floating next to session "foo", and toggle it gets.

I only mention this 'cause I'm heading to using more and more to be constantly opening and closing my different groupings of research, reading, and social networking.

Thanks

[tim-we]

I would like to improve keyboard navigation but I am not sure whats the best way to do this.
Apart from the way you describe it I could see two other ways to do fast session restoring/toggling:

• making sessions selectable (within the sidebar) via up and down arrow keys and then some key (e.g. Enter) or shortcut to toggle the state.
• introducing a new base shortcut (e.g. Alt + R) + {1,2,3} for restoring the topmost (most recently used) sessions

What do you think?

[m2habert]

I'm not fond of the first possibility, as "up-and-dowing-through-keys" is slower and cumbersome.

The second idea seems similar to mine (maybe I did not express mine clearly)...

Or, maybe, your intention is to be able to toggle each session without the need of opening the side bar (<alt+Q>) first, which would be even better.

My only say would be to strees that "topmost" should keep following the order presented by firefox's Library window (just like tabs aside's sidebar currently does), maintaining coherence.

A further improvement could also be the possibility for the user to assign chars to his/her favorite sessions. As in, following your <alt+R> example:

• let's say a user has a session/group/window dedicated to reddit reading
• he'd probably toggle=open/close that same window many times a day
• if he'd choose "R" as the "quickmark" for such faved session,
  then user would press <alt+r> <r> for "restore"/"set aside"

Thanks

[ootada]

Will add my thoughts - there can be several use cases, f.e.:

a) one might have a few sessions that he uses every day and would like to have constant shortcuts for them
b) or have too many sessions to play with shortcuts (me) and just wants a 'spotlight' type quicksearch:

Speaking of which, I'm missing:

• a keyboard shortcut for focusing "search sessions"

• ability to quickly toggle 'search only in session names' (not the tab titles inside)

• a way to select a session after narrowing down results with search:

  • cursor up/down+enter is very workable if you have narrowed to a few results to select from
  • assigning a number keys to results might also work very well

• actually, you have a ALT-Q already, why would you not put focus to 'search sessions' after ALT-Q so you can just type after opening the session list without another pressing anything else?
  (one way to go then: pressing ALT-Q second time with empty search box would close the list, or leave the list but clear the search if the search box is not empty.. might need to meditate a bit on this one yet)

• and... I'd experiment with moving search box to top (or making it an option)

[tim-we]

I think those are great ideas but I don't think search auto focus in the sidebar is possible as the code already tries to do this:

tabs-aside/src/ts/sidebar/Search.ts

Line 21 in 28871bf

searchInput.focus();

Happy to be corrected on that one, if anybody knows how to do it. AFAIK there is no API for that. Perhaps we have to open an issue here. If the sidebar is already focused you can press Ctrl + F to focus the search.

ability to quickly toggle 'search only in session names' (not the tab titles inside)

Sounds good, any suggestions how this should be implemented (UI/UX)?

and... I'd experiment with moving search box to top (or making it an option)

Not so sure about this but I would not mind an option for that. However, currently I only have limited time for Tabs Aside and there are more important things IMO, so don't expect that anytime soon. Happy to accept a PR for that though. If anyone is interested in implementing that please contact me, happy to help.

[tim-we]

There is already a bug on bugzilla for this: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1502713