Tag: chrome extension

Rearrange Tabs 3.0.0

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Antescript: Rearrange Tabs 3.0.0 is now live on the Chrome Web Store!

Earlier today, I submitted the new rewrite of my Chrome extension, Rearrange Tabs, to the Chrome Web Store. It’s pending review at this point. Personally, I’m very excited about this release. It fixes all the known issues around key combination conflicts and performance.

Originally, I wanted to just upgrade the extension to include the changes around migrating the extension from Manifest v2 to Manifest v3. As I started working on it, I took the opportunity to rewrite the extension and roll it out as 3.0.0. It seemed like a no-brainer.

Why the rewrite?

It’s been a while since I made any changes to the extension. The last time I rolled out an update was on April 26, 2020, v2.1.7. The extension has been stable, albeit with a few performance issues and bugs. So, I wanted to address them all in the same release and just bundled all the fixes in this release.

What’s included?

1. Migration from v2 to v3

Google has been pushing extension developers to upgrade to the latest Manifest v3. Google requires all the Featured extensions on Chrome Web Store to comply with the latest Manifest. The changes were minimal for the extension and the migration guide is very well documented. That helped a lot. Good job, Google!

2. Performance

Over the years, as new features got added, the extension accrued a few performance related issues. I’ve addresses them in this release. I will talk about them in-depth in a separate post. The debugging session was fun 🙂

3. Bug fixes

There were reports of bugs in the extension. I’ve addressed the most annoying and common ones. I hope this makes the users happy and enjoy using the extension. I just hope I didn’t introduce new ones.

4. Deprecating wrap around

The extension supported go around feature since v1. When a user moved a tab to the rightmost or the leftmost position of the browser window, any further movement in that direction would push the tab around to the other side. I’ve deprecated this feature. This seemed nice in the beginning when I introduced this, but I saw myself not really using it. Also, it seemed pointless since you can still use the “Move to front” or “Move to back” functions. The push-around-to-the-other-side just felt unnecessary.

5. New Updated Page

I’ve added a new page that shows up when your extension is upgraded from 2.x.x to 3.0.0 with the necessary info around the changes.

Future

I am planning on redesigning the logo for the extension and come up with a better demo to display on the extension page on the Web Store. The current one looks outdated, which it is. It’s from 2015. It has been the same since I created it. It’s time for an update.

<3

I definitely enjoyed working on this version of the update. Hope you all like the updated version of the extension. If you haven’t tried the extension yet, give it a shot here: Rearrange Tabs 3.0.0

As always, feel free to contribute to the extension here: Rearrange Tabs on GitHub

Your contribution could be a suggestion, feature request, a pull request, or filing a bug – your effort is always appreciated.

Two Years on Chrome Webstore

Exactly 2 years ago (Mar 22nd, 2015), on a Sunday afternoon, I wrote and open sourced Rearrange Tabs. I use it every single day. I find it pretty useful.

The extension got featured on LifeHacker & Changelog 🎉

Here are a few interesting stats about the project:

  • Active Users: 1000+
  • No. of Reviews on Chrome Webstore: 28
  • Rating on Chrome Wesbtore: 5 stars
  • Stars on GitHub: 39
  • Forks on GitHub: 10

Clearly, these are not mind blowing. But they’re not bad either. Also, this is my first project where the code written by my contributors is more than the code I’d initially written. I hope more people use it and find it useful. :cheers:

Rearrange Tabs

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:

  1. Open your extensions page (or visit chrome://extensions from your URL bar)
  2. Scroll to the bottom
  3. Click on Keyboard Shortcuts
  4. 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 🙂