Exporting List of Chromium Tabs

November 13, 2024

I have an unhealthy habit of opening too many tabs. You can organize them whichever way you want, but, by the time you reach a couple of hundred, chances are you won’t ever dig yourself out of the hole. I have a workaround, which is similar to the method I use on my INBOX: periodically getting rid of them all (apologies to all of you to whom I owe an email, and who will never receive a reply). Clearing tabs typically comes in one of two forms: switching browsers, or running the excellent One Tab extension.

One Tab pretty much covers my use case—it collates tabs into a single page, from where you can close tabs, open sets of tabs, etc. But I thought it would be neat to export a plain text list of all of my tabs, in org-mode or markdown format. That way, I can store it in my daily organization system, and efficiently filter through the URLs in my text editor.

After some bumbling around, I realized that the SNSS files stored under ~/.config/chromium/Default/Sessions/, while perhaps containing the information I need, would not yield easily.

The Chrome API looked promising, but cannot be accessed outside of extensions. Therefore, we wrote an extension.

The Extension

Turns out extensions are pretty easy to construct under Chrome / Chromium. You need a manifest.json file with some meta-data, which points to an HTML popup to show when the user clicks on the extension button. And in the background, you can run a “service worker”, which responds to events generated in the popup.

Here’s our manifest:

{
  "manifest_version": 3,
  "name": "tabs2text",
  "description": "Export list of open tabs as markdown / org text",
  "version": "0.1",
  "permissions": ["tabs", "tabGroups", "downloads"],
  "action": {
    "default_popup": "popup.html"
  },
  "background": {
    "service_worker": "service-worker.js"
  }
}

The popup is some simple HTML to display a form which asks: do you want to download the file in org or markdown format? What is the maximum title length? And a button, that you click to start the show:

Screenshot of tabs2text in action

The service worker does the bulk of the work: it iterates over the windows and tabs, and constructs an org or markdown-formatted string. For markdown, it would look something like this:

const windows = await chrome.windows.getAll({populate: true});

for (let [windowIndex, window] of windows.entries()) {
  let content = '';

  window.tabs.forEach(tab => {
    content += `- [${tab.title}](${tab.url})`;
  }
}

Then, there’s some footwork to add headings, and to handle tab groups.

Finally, we take the string and bundle it as a file download:

const mimeType = (format === 'markdown') ? 'text/markdown' : 'text/org';
const dataUrl = `data:${mimeType};charset=utf-8,${encodeURIComponent(content)}`;
const filename = `tabs-export.${format === 'markdown' ? 'md' : 'org'}`;

await chrome.downloads.download({
  url: dataUrl,
  filename: filename,
  saveAs: true
});

The full source code is available at: https://github.com/stefanv/chrome-tabs2text

Installing the extension

Obviously, you should not run an extension by a stranger (me!) without reading the code. Once you’re satisfied that it does what it’s supposed to, here are the steps for installing the extension:

Clone or download the repository.
In Chrome, navigate to Extensions -> Manage Extensions, and toggle the “Developer Mode” button at the top right.
Click “Load unpacked”, and select the repository directory from (1).
tabs2text should now be visible under the list of extensions (typically a little puzzle piece in the top bar).

Enjoy, and file a pull request if you make improvements!

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