19.04.

23, 14:13 How To Use Basics

How To Use
This extension is aimed at solving a complex problem (it is a really working solution to the
"too many open tabs" trouble). So, inevitably, there is a learning curve and some new
concepts... not too much, but there's some mental effort required. Don't just read - try
things.

Quick start
Close and Save - close a tab or window, but leave a link to it saved in the
tree.
Buttons with a blue background on the Main Toolbar (find them at the bottom left
corner of this window) expected to be Drag and Droped into the tree, to create
additional nodes, like notes or separators where you drop them.
Drag some selected text from a web page to the tree to create a short note, take a
look.
In the same way you can drag any link on the page or an url from the address bar
into the tree.
Use Double click to activate already open windows or tabs, restore saved items,
edit notes, or change separator appearance.
Delete (trash) removes only the highlighted node; to delete a node and all
subnodes, collapse it first.
Open windows can be deleted without collapsing them, but this will not delete any
items with notes, saved tabs, or other windows inside. You can effectively use this
feature to leave as saved only marked tabs. (Just put the window in some other
node before this, to prevent marked items falling to the root level).
Green Cross (save-close) button behaves the same way: it saves only the current
item. If you want to save the hierarchy with other windows or tabs inside, in one
click - collapse it first. Individual windows can be saved without collapsing them.
Tabs and Windows will be saved automatically, on close, if they contain notes.
Tabs and Windows by default disappears from the tree after being closed, or on
Chrome exit.
However, if they have any custom style or notes in direct subnodes (or actually
anything in subnodes that is not a some other regular open tab), their knots gain a
green mark (or ). And this mark indicates that after being closed by Chrome
they will stay in the tree as saved, along with notes or other special subnodes, to
preserve the context of your notes and edits.
There are several other ways to preserve open items in the tree after their being
closed from Chrome:
You can Ctrl-drag a hierarchy of open items to create a saved copy.
A window will be also saved on close (initiated by Chrome's window close
button), along with all its tabs, if:
it is located not at the root level (for example in some Group or in other
Window),
or has a custom title,

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or contains in its own hierarchy any node that is not a regular open tab.

Note that the main (and simplest) method to keep tabs and windows in the tree, if
you want to see them again after normal Chrome exit, is to save them explicitly, by
pressing the green cross button on them.
There is no need to put notes on items to save them automatically on close, in some
distant future, just save explicitly by clicking the green cross.You can safely
ignore all these complex rules, they only expand the cases when items will stay
in the tree automatically, so the worst thing that might hapen is that you additionaly
will be needed to delete something manually.
This button will save and unload (close) all open windows and tabs.
You can use it before a Chrome exit, to preserve everything, or just if you need to
switch focus and start some new work.
In case of sudden crash, everything that was open will stay in the tree as
saved regardless of whether there were notes on those items or not. You do not need
to copy-save (by Ctrl-drag) open items, or add notes to them, to ensure their survival
on Chrome or PC crash.
Advice: do not use Chrome's "Restore After Crash" feature.
That will create a lot of duplicates in the tree. To more easily acquire such a habit,
first open the Tabs Outliner after the crash, from the same window that asks
about restore (without closing it), to convince yourself that everything is in
place and ready to restore at any moment you wish.

Short video tutorials

Group and Note nodes as parents for tabs.
This video demonstrates the difference between Group and Note nodes when they
are used not in their primary roles (Group - to group other windows; Note - to mark
and comment something in the tree) but for grouping tabs.
In short, the Group is actually a Saved Window and behaves accordingly.
How to quickly clean up a messy browsing session.
This video presents a useful technique to quickly collect and confidently delete a
garbage from the tree.
This is also good demonstration of Tabs Outliner's tree flexibility. This powerful use
case is only possible because any node can be a parent for any other node, without
special cases and exceptions.

FAQ
How do I place a node in between other nodes, or as the last subnode? The drop
area is too small?

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To place a node between other nodes, on the same level, you must drop it not betwee
node titles, but on the vertical line which connects nodes of this level (from which th
“grow”). To place the node as last subnode on a level, drop it on the trailing dot of the
level line, or on the empty area beneath the dot (it will be highlighted on hover). See
these illustrations:

How to search through the tree?

Hit Ctrl-F
Why does this window scroll all the time?
It scrolls on every window switch to show your currently active browser window and
all its tabs always in a same position - at the top of this window.
This feature can be disabled in options.
Note that cloned views (opened by ) does not auto scroll.
You can also undo some incidental auto scrolls by Undo Scroll . This button can
undo any scrolls, so it's also useful in combination with Scroll Up To Next Open
Window (to scroll backwards). Also, when pressed in cloned view it will set
cloned view scroll position to the same position as in the original view.
If delete removes only the highlighted node, then why when I delete a window, all of
its tabs are also gone?
This is because the tabs will go through the standard close process as a result of
their containing window closing. The tabs are treated the same as if they were
closed by you from Chrome window.
Note that, if some tabs have notes or other marks such tabs will be preserved in the
tree as saved on their window close.
If you delete an expanded saved window, all its saved (gray) tabs will remain in the
tree.
How to undo closed window/tab, or restore a window that was open in last Chrome
session?
To restore accidentally closed or deleted open windows and tabs you can right click
in Chrome tab strip (in any open Chrome window) and select "Reopen closed tab"
or "Reopen closed window".
Alternatively, you can restore your tabs from the Chrome's History and revcent
tabs menu item.
Note that this is also work after Chrome exit (or closing the last Chrome window),
and this is why this extension does not automatically save last open window without
any marks on normal Chrome exit (as some other session savers).
How to use this extension as a classic session saver or instead of a bookmarks
collections?

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This extension facilitates a much more powerful way to deal with tabs overload. But
some users do not have such problems and are completely satisfied with a more
classical approach for collecting open tabs. It is possible to mimic them with Tabs
Outliner.
A full saved copy of an open window can be created by Ctrl-drag&drop. This is an
analog of saving the session separately from the list of open objects.
To restore the window without affecting and changing the saved copy you can: or
clone this copy again and then restore this second copy; or, and this is more handy,
to click on the saved tabs with Ctrl or Shift pressed. Just as on regular links or
bookmarks Shift-click will open a new window with the clicked tab (in the end of the
tree) and Ctrl-click (or middle click) will open the tab in the last focused open
window. All of this happens without restoring the tabs in a saved copy.
This is also sometimes useful for opening a lot of links from different saved windows
in a set of new windows in the end of the tree.
How to export the tree, to share or reopen it on another computer.
You can export and share your full tree, or only some hierarchies, by dragging them
in a Google Doc document (Evernote, Microsoft Word, and many other programs also
work).
Also, to do a backup/export you can perform standard "Save as complete Html"
operation in the Tabs Outliner window (by Ctrl-S). The resulting file will be very
usable to reopen all your tabs, as they will be exported as regular HTML links. You
will even be able to drag anything from such a file back to the main Tabs Outliner
window.
Please note that only expanded nodes will be exported, so click Expand All button
before this operation (expand all can be undone by a second click on this button).
Also, after Upgrading to a paid license there will be an additional option to open a
Google Drive backup of your tree directly from the Google Drive using any connected
to your Google Drive account instance of Tabs Outliner (or mobile application in the
near future)

More verbose guide

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You are now in the Main View. This shows you all your open windows and tabs in the
form of a tree. This tree is completely rearrangeable by drag & drop. You can drag &
drop window nodes to tabs, assign some special subnodes (like notes) to othere
nodes (more on this later), change the order of windows, liberate tab nodes to new
windows by dropping them between window nodes (try it, tip: when dragging a tab
from a window to liberate it in a new window, aim (and drop) at the left-most
vertical line which connects the window nodes to the root of tree).
The main view autoscroll itself on every browser window switch to show you
currently active Chrome window in the first line - so you can always easily see all
of the tabs in the currently active window.
Closed tabs and windows by default disappear from the tree, if they not contains
some custom notes.

This button will clone the current view. Cloned views do not auto-scroll when
active Chrome window switches and because you can drag nodes from one view to
another they allow easier drag & drop between distant parts of the tree.
Сloned views, on open, scroll self to show end of the tree (drag from middle of the
tree in one view to the end of the tree in the other is most common operation). To
scroll a cloned view to the same position as the view from which it is cloned click
the Undo Scroll button in cloned view.
A notable difference of Cloned views is that they will not autoscroll themselves when
the active Chrome window changes (the main view constantly autoscrolls to always
show the tabs of the current window). When you need to greatly rearrange your
tree, or plan to work exclusively with a same region of tree for some time, use
cloned views as they will not needlessly jump.
The Undo Scroll button can also be used to undo the last autoscroll in the main
view.

This is the Close & Save button. It appears only on nodes which represent open
windows or tabs. It will close them (unload from memory), but leaves links to them
in the tree! So you will be able to restore closed this way tabs and entire windows
anytime you want and in same context.
Note that you may close-save individual tabs in a window, they then will not
dissappear from the tree even if you close their parent window.

Use Double-Click to reopen preserved (saved) tabs & windows

or bring them to the front if they already open.
Alternatively, because preserved(saved) tabs are represented by standard html links,
you can shift-click to open them in a new window, or cntrl-click to open them in last
focused window, or drag&drop them to any open browser window (this will not affect
a clicked node, it will create new tabs & windows).
Try all of this to better understand and remember!

This button will completely delete a highlighted node from the tree (and if this node
represents an open tab or window they will be closed), all subnodes will be promoted
in place of the deleted node. To remove an entire subtree first collapse it.
The delete operation does not delete subnodes (if the node is not collapsed), only
the highlighted node. But, if you delete a node which represents an open window,
then, during window closing, all open tabs of this window will be also automatically
shut down and as a result (if they do not have some special subnodes - see below)
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shut down and as a result (if they do not have some special subnodes see below)
they will disappear from tree.
Paid features
To quickly collapse subnodes before deleting or saving complete hierarchy click on
the circle in the node's hovering menu.

Buttons with a blue background are expected to be drag&droped somewhere in the

tree, not just clicked. They represent additional nodes (read tooltips on them to learn
what). If just clicked they add corresponding nodes to the end of the tree.
Click, or better, drag to tree, all of them, to learn what nodes they create.

The most complex concept of this extension is understanding when nodes which
represent open tabs & windows disappear from tree, after the corresponding object
was closed in Chrome and when they stay.
The idea is that windows and tabs nodes are preserved in the tree if you close them
by the button, or! if they have some manually assigned subnodes which are not
a regular open tabs.
So if you close some tab using the standard Chrome tab close button or by
closing the Chrome window , the corresponding node will be removed
from the tree. But only if they do not have any special subnodes, like notes, saved
tabs, other windows, groups - anything that is not an open tab. If they have some of
these nodes, as children, then they will be preserved in tree, the same as if you
pressed on them. So you will not lose the context for your notes.
In future releases this will expand to cover manually placed icons, tags, labels,
custom styles.
The idea is - everything you place manually on an open tab node will protect it from
deletion after the tab is closed.
Additionally, all nodes for open tabs and windows will be automatically preserved
in case of sudden pc or browser crash.

This is Close & Preserve All Open Windows Button - will be very handy in times when
you cannot stop yourself from procrastinating by net surfing and need to start
working.
It will warn you before acting with a confirmation dialog; and not unreversible, as
you will be able to easily find and reload any of the closed windows and tabs at a
more convenient time.
If you constantly accumulate a pile of open tabs you can actually save yourself a lot
of productive time and computer resources by regularly using this feature. Because
all of the saved tabs become much less tempting after some time, and most of them
actually was open only to remind you of something, not because their content is
constantly needed.
Often this "remind me" information is not in some specific tab, but rather in the
context as whole (all of the open tabs and windows) - all of these tabs and windows
will be preserved during close, so you will no longer fear losing this context during a
total browser shutdown (as it is often the case). Thus this total close of all Chrome
windows will become psychologically much more easy.
Usually you will reopen only a small number of closed tabs later, delete others, or
simply leave them as is. It is harmless to keep the tabs as saved in tree; you do not
need to constantly clean-up your tree; the tree over time will become you browsing
workbook and diary.
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y
This tool was for several years free, with an expectation that donations might enable further
Please note that the content of tab is not saved locally during close-preserving (this
development. Unfortunately, they were basically at zero, and so was the development of new
feature is actually planed) so you will need Internet access when you decide to
features. A typical situation actually in the Chrome Web Store with similar tools.
restore them. Tab history is also not saved, as this is not supported by Chrome API
So, to try some other approaches and to be able fund the development of many badly
meantime.
needed improvements there are now some paid features.
One very handy alternative of this button is killing the Chrome parent process
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Complete keyboard support and additional commands
You can review what keyboard shortcuts and additional commands will be available
after the upgrade by invoking the context menu of any node in the tree (by right
mouse click).

Context menu is also serving as a handy reference for keyboard shortcuts of all
available commands.
The most important shortcuts to remember is:
[Ins] and [Enter] to add notes inside and after the current node.
[Ctrl+Arrows] to move current node/note around ([Tab] also works)
[F2] to edit current note, window/group title or to add an inline note for the
current tab.

Check more supported shortcuts by invoking context menu.

Global Chrome keyboard shortcuts
A paid license enables you to use global keyboard shortcuts in Chrome for
Opening the Tabs Outliner
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Save and Close the current tab

Some useful tips
Save and Close the current window
Save and Close all of the open windows

To configure these shortcuts go to the Chrome settings, select Extensions section and
click Keyboard Shortcuts link at the bottom of the page. Alternatively you can copy and
paste or drag and drop next link into the address bar:
chrome://extensions/configureCommands (it's not directly clickable because of the
security restrictions that Chrome enforce on extensions)
Full support for clipboard operations
Usage of the clipboard, in additional for more ways to manipulate and adding content
into the tree, also enables some new ways for exporting hierarchies.
For example, one of the very useful scenarios is an ability to copy and then paste some
hierarchy into the instant messaging program (like Skype) text box in the form of plain
text. For quickly share it with somebody.
Automatic Daily Backups to the Google Drive
When you start to use this tool, you will find that it is quickly accumulate many data
that will be very unpleasant to lost.
Yet the locally stored in Chrome data is very prone to loss. As you can easily see, in
reviews, the data loss is very common (and the number one reason for the low rates).
It's true as for this tool as for many other extensions that store data locally in Chrome.
Data loss can happen anytime, for many different reasons, often during automatic
Chrome updates.
Automatic Google Drive backup solve this problem to a great extent. Meantime they are
created only once per day, or can be invoked anytime manually. In future, it is planned
to make them continuous, to solve the sudden data loss problem completely.
Please if you use this tool in the free mode perform regularly a manual export of the
tree through Ctrl-S (save as complete html), to secure your data.
Remote access for your data
Google Drive backup feature not only make your data safe, they also add an ability to
access your tree remotely, from your other Tabs Outliner instance installed on another
PC.
You can check how it works by going to the Options and opening the Backup tab. From
there you can invoke few backups manually. To check how they work and how it is
possible to access your tree from a backup on the Google Drive.
Automatic local backup snapshots created several times per hour
They do not rescue you from an HDD fail, stolen notebook or weird Chrome update or
crash that clear all your data, as this do backups saved into the Google Drive. However,
as they created much more often, they are useful to restore some accidentally or
mistakenly deleted content, that was created after the last successful Google Drive
backup (wich happens only once in 24 hours, if you do not invoke it manually).

To upgrade, go to the Options and buy the license key.

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Flatten Tabs Hierarchy command (Paid Mode only) works starting from the current
node, so it will flatten the tabs structure only beneath the current node, and have no
effect if the current node has no tabs inside it. To see its effect best to invoke it on
window nodes. It's primary goal to tidy up the tabs structure in windows.
Drag and Drop with the Alt key pressed in order to copy nodes around the tree. Any
open tabs and windows you drag will be copied as saved (preserved).
One handy use case for this feature: you can quickly clone by this method some
already placed nearby notes (like: “to read” or “to see comments”) to other tabs,
without retyping them from scratch every time (also handy for separators).
Another useful case - to make a saved copy of some open window (with all the tabs),
without save-closing it.
Note: it is also possible to do the same drag operation with the more standard Ctrl
key, but unfortunately, drags with Ctrl key have some weird zoom behaviour in
Chrome, near the left and right sides of window. So, a nonstandard (for such use
case) Alt key is a way around this problem.
Selected text or a link can be dragged from the outside into the Tabs Outliner window
and dropped on the tree as note or saved tab. This is very useful for quickly creating
notes (without manually typing) from a selected text on some page, or a link. Links
from the Chrome address bar and bookmarks panel can also be dragged and copied to
the tree this way.
You can use built-in Chrome
search functionality (hit Ctrl-
F) to search through
visible(expanded) nodes.
Collapse possibility there is
more for some sort of "soft"
delete and also to support
deletion of the whole
hierarchy (as by default
delete work only for current node).
It is not convenient to collapse items for which you plan to return in future, as built
in search is not working through collapsed items.
Expand All action is undoable by next click so you can safely expand all nodes before
a search, to include in search all nodes, and then collapse everything back as it was
before.
A quick way to refresh all of the tabs in some open window is to save-close it and then
open again immediately. This is also a way to quickly reopen rest of the saved tabs in a
window if it is already has few open tabs.
You can multiselect tabs in Chrome's tabs strip and then drag them to form a new
window, delete or move.

To multiselect several tabs click on them (in the Chrome's tabs strip, not in Tabs
Outliner) with Ctrl pressed to select individual tabs, or Shift click to select a range of
tabs. Then move the selected set of tabs as a whole to a new or existed window.
You can also close only the selected tabs or perform some other operations on them
through the Chrome's tabs strip context menu.
Differences between Group and Note nodes. Besides the visual difference there is also a
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pressing the Undo Scroll button in the cloned view you can set its scroll position
same as in original view.
Expand All button expands all collapsed nodes and allows undoing this action by
next click on it (after the first click it will change icon to ).
Expand All action is here mainly to allow use the built-in Chrome search
functionality (Ctrl-F), as it is doing search only through the visible nodes. But it is
also useful before saving Tabs Outliner window as HTML file, or before exporting the
tree to Google Docs.
You can reopen tabs represented by saved nodes without restoring them in place, by
using cntrl/middle/shift click (or by their context menu). This is also a way to reopen
tabs, from different saved windows and different parts of tree, in one or several new
windows. It's also works for Chrome's bookmarks.
All tab nodes are represented by HTML links and there are standard browser
operations which can be performed on any link which many are not aware of:
Shift click will always open the link in a new window.
Ctrl click (or middle click) in Tabs Outliner will open a link in the last focused
Chrome window.
You can combine these - create a new window by first clicking the link with shift-
click, then, even without selecting the new window, open all additional links inside
them with ctrl-click.
It is very useful and often
needed to liberate several tabs
grouped in a subtree into a
new window, nearby to the
original window (in Tabs
Outliner tree). To do this, drag
tabs to the vertical root level
line which connects all
windows.
Once dropped they will form a
new window in the drop location.
Up to Next Open Window button is an effective way to find the first open window
i th t i ll h it i b i d d
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19.04.23, 14:13 How To Use Basics
in the tree, especially when it is buried deep inside the tree and surrounded by many
saved windows.
To do so you can click it until the view will stop scrolling because there where no more
open windows above, or scroll manually to the top of tree and then press this button to
scroll back to the first open window.
This extension saves all open tabs in case of sudden Chrome or PC crash. It is better to
restore them from the Tabs Outliner, not by the restore feature built into Chrome.
The Chrome restore feature will create new nodes for restored items, so you will have
duplicates for all crashed-saved tabs.
This is annoying at first, but it is actually something that can be fixed by forming a
useful new habit as most of the time it is a bad idea to restore everything that was
crashed (maybe it will also be addressed someway in the future)
If you often need reopen some predefined sets of tabs, the bookmarks bar is actually
more useful for this than Tabs Outliner. I recommend enabling the bookmarks bar (Ctrl-
Shift-B) and putting all frequently visited sites on it.
Take note that you can rename bookmarks, and the more shorter the names you will
give to them the more bookmarks will be visible in the bookmarks bar. You can even
completely delete a bookmark title and leave only the icon visible.
One more useful tip - you can group bookmarks in folders in the bookmarks bar,
then, by Ctrl or middle click on the folder title you can reopen simultaneously all of
the bookmarks in this folder.
If you close-save a tab that contains a form in which you entered some data (but did
not submit) your data will be lost. This is often the case when you write some message
in a forum or comments section in some blog, yet for some reason you are not ready to
send it, so it is hanging and waiting for your decision, and suddenly you decide that it is
time to do some work, and close-save all open windows, forgetting about this form.
There exists solutions for this problem. Extensions like “Lazarus Form Recovery”
constantly monitors all your tabs and saves all entered data, so when you reopen a
saved tab with some form in it, you will be able to easily restore all previously entered
text.

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