OCD is weird. It makes a person do weird things. For instance, I find it annoying to have tabs not grouped by their purpose. When I’m working, I usually have the documentation opened in one tab (which usually is the left tab) and the tab to its right, absolutely, has to be the tab that’s running my local copy of the app that I’m currently working on.
I’m used to using the mouse to rearrange my tabs all the time. Sometimes, I have multiple windows open (if I’m at work, since I have a dual-monitor setup) at the same time. I’ve always wanted to have keyboard shortcuts that did all this. That’s the reason I wrote a new Google Chrome Extension called Rearrange Tabs.
Rearrange Tabs
Rearrange Tabs is a tiny Google Chrome Extension that you can install right now to use keyboard shortcuts to move your tabs around in your Google Chrome browser.
- To move a tab to its left
Windows: Shift+Alt+Left Mac: Ctrl+Shift+Left - To move a tab to its right
Windows: Shift+Alt+Right Mac: Ctrl+Shift+Right
Edit: Previously the shortcut to move the tab on Mac was Alt+Shift+<Arrow>. I had to update this since it was overriding the word highlight shortcut and made it hard to edit text inside the browser. That is fixed now.
Edit 2: You can now customize your keyboard shortcuts to move the tabs.
To customize your keyboard shortcut by following these steps:
- Open your extensions page (or visit chrome://extensions from your URL bar)
- Scroll to the bottom
- Click on Keyboard Shortcuts
- Under the “Rearrange Tabs” section, you can configure whichever shortcut you want
Update: The extension got featured on Lifehacker & Changelog 🎉
Here’s how it looks like:
You can find it here.
Rearrange Tabs can
- Move tabs around in a window using keyboard shortcuts
- Duplicate current tab to a new window [this is WIP]
- Separate active tab out from the current window into a new window using keyboard shortcuts [this is also WIP]
As always, I’ve open sourced Rearrange Tabs. ❤️
You can find it here https://github.com/mohnish/rearrange-tabs
Feel free to open an issue or a pull request 🙂