Tablist management

Sometimes I end up with a lister which has several dozen tabs open, and I'm wondering how to most efficiently clean it up, closing the unnecessary tabs, and keeping the five or so that are important at the moment.

I'm aware of the "close all to the left" and "close all to the right" options, but those aren't helpful here, since the ones I need are scattered throughout. Similarly, I'm aware that I can "lock" the important tabs and then do a "close all", however that's also a bit cumbersome, especially since the tabs on the "overflow" menu (that is, the popup menu which displays the tabs that don't fit on the tab row) don't have a right-click menu.

I think that the ideal solution would be a popup dialog which would show the list of tabs with checkboxes next to them, allowing the user to go through the list all at once, checking or unchecking the tabs to close.

Alternatively, if that is not possible at this time, would it be possible to please enable the right click menu for the tabs on the "overflow" popup menu, such that those tabs would be able to be closed or locked directly via the right click menu?

Just an idea. Tabs with the same root / drive could be "auto-tab-grouped" into just one tab. So let´s say, there are currently five tabs open with the root of G:, so they wouldn´t any longer
being represented as five single tabs, but when clicked, would expand on the listers side into all five discrete tabs. When clicking another tab, they would collaps into one tab again, or,
per command or context menu, being reduced into the closest tab to the root (keeping G:\ rather than G:\something, G:\music etc.). Also, there could be an option to look for double tabs,
which would be automatically avoided, like some browser extensions can do it, for example for Opera.

Hi abr,

Thanks for your ideas. In my case, I don't think that I would find "auto-tab-grouping" helpful. However, I do like your idea about duplicate tabs. I do sometimes end up with duplicate tabs, and I do like the idea of having a command to "remove duplicate tabs".

  • Avi

I'm wondering why you open so many tabs. (On the other hand, I personally often have problem with too many DOpus windows open.)
Maybe try changing default folder double-click action and folder tree click actions to GO NEWTAB=findexisting which will prevent you from opening too many tabs when it's not necessary.

Oops... changing double-click action to NEWTAB definitely will not help you keep as few tabs as possible. :slight_smile: I was thinking about the action you do to open new tab (whatever it is - a button, key modifier + double-click etc.) and add "findexisting" parameter to it.

@abr - my son has written a standalone utility which closes all duplicate tabs in the current lister. It can be assigned to a hotkey for quick access.

If you (or anyone else) would like a copy of the utility, email me (my email consists of my last name - Shmidman - followed by gmail.com).

I think Daroc made a good point. Isn't it better to avoid the problem in the first place (e.g. using NEWTAB=findexisting) than to clean up the mess afterwards? Maybe there's a reason that can't work but it's worth looking at how all those duplicate tabs are coming about and if the real problem is earlier on in the process.

Hi Leo,
I think the duplicate tabs come about mostly due to the following scenario:
Say I'm working in a directory c:\data\music\session1, and I realize I need to check something in c:\data\music. And suppose that c:\data\music is open in another tab. At this point, it's easiest to just backspace to c:\data\music, rather than switch to c:\data\music, because one keystroke is better than several. If you do that enough times, you end up with a bunch of duplicate tabs.

, I see. That makes sense. Thanks!