TabIt – Open Tabs in Chrome with a Variable

Posted by Josh on April 6, 2016 Leave a comment (0) Go to comments

I constantly find myself needing to open a lot of similar tabs to research something at work. For example, maybe I want to review account notes on a few dozen accounts, or I want to audit 30-40 support tickets.

Most web apps usually just pass unique identifiers in the URL itself. For example, if you use Zendesk, a ticket URL might be https://subdomain.zendesk.com/tickets/123456 where 123456 is the Ticket ID number. You might have an internal CRM tool that has a URL like https://internal.company.com/accounts/95438.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that by just changing the 95438 in the URL to a different number, you pull up a different account. So instead of going through the trouble of searching in the web app, most people just change the URL to the account they are looking for, or create a custom search in their browser.

When I have more than 4 or 5 of the same type of item I want to review (Tickets, Accounts, whatever), it becomes tedious to copy each item, open a new tab manually, paste the variable, and wait for the page to load.

For cases like this, I wrote a simple bash utility that I call tabit. Tabit has one job: Read input from a file and open a bunch of tabs with the specific variables. Here is a quick example using Youtube (since I obviously won’t share the links to Rackspace’s internal tools).

Say you have a list of the 10 most popular Youtube Video IDs.

9bZkp7q19f0

RgKAFK5djSk

ORhEE9VVg

OPf0YbXqDm0

YQHsXMglC9A

nfWlot6h_JM

NUsoVlDFqZg

0KSOMA3QBU0

kffacxfA7G4

7PCkvCPvDXk

We know that Youtube’s URL format is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=<Unique ID>. Instead of manually copying/pasting that 10 times, here is how you would do it with Tabit.

First, grab the source from github: https://github.com/joshprewitt/tabit or copy the script below.

#!/bin/bash

#Initialize variables to default values.
TABFILE="$HOME/.tabit"
NEWWINDOW=1

#Set fonts for Help.
NORM=$(tput sgr0)
BOLD=$(tput bold)


#Help function
function HELP {
  echo -e \\n"${BOLD}Help documentation for tabit${NORM}"\\n
  echo -e "${BOLD}Basic usage: ${NORM}tabit [options] <start of URL with trailing slash> [Remainder of URL with leading slash]"\\n
  echo "${BOLD}Options:${NORM}"
  echo "${BOLD}-f${NORM} <path to file>. -- File to read variables from. Default is ~/.tabit"
  echo "${BOLD}-c${NORM} -- Use Current Window."
  exit 1
}

#Check the number of arguments. If none are passed, print help and exit.
NUMARGS=$#
if [ $NUMARGS -eq 0 ]; then
  HELP
fi

### Start getopts code ###

#Parse command line flags
#If an option should be followed by an argument, it should be followed by a ":".
#Notice there is no ":" after "h". The leading ":" suppresses error messages from
#getopts. This is required to get my unrecognized option code to work.

while getopts :f:ch FLAG; do
  case $FLAG in
    f)  #set option for custom file
      TABFILE=$OPTARG
      ;;
    c)  #set option for current window
      NEWWINDOW=0
      ;;
    h)  #show help
      HELP
      ;;
    \?) #unrecognized option - show help
      echo -e \\n"Option $OPTARG not allowed."
      HELP
      ;;
  esac
done

shift $((OPTIND-1))  #This tells getopts to move on to the next argument.


#Call Chrome by itself. This will create a new window instead of hijacking the existing one.
if [ $NEWWINDOW -eq 1 ]; then
  /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome
fi

### Actually Open The Tabs ###
while read line; do open -a /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome $1$line$2; done < $TABFILE

#!/bin/bash

#Initialize variables to default values.

TABFILE="$HOME/.tabit"

NEWWINDOW=1

#Set fonts for Help.

NORM=$(tput sgr0)

BOLD=$(tput bold)

#Help function

function HELP {

echo -e \\n"${BOLD}Help documentation for tabit${NORM}"\\n

echo -e "${BOLD}Basic usage: ${NORM}tabit [options] <start of URL with trailing slash> [Remainder of URL with leading slash]"\\n

echo "${BOLD}Options:${NORM}"

echo "${BOLD}-f${NORM} <path to file>. -- File to read variables from. Default is ~/.tabit"

echo "${BOLD}-c${NORM} -- Use Current Window."

exit 1

}

#Check the number of arguments. If none are passed, print help and exit.

NUMARGS=$#

if [ $NUMARGS -eq 0 ]; then

HELP

### Start getopts code ###

#Parse command line flags

#If an option should be followed by an argument, it should be followed by a ":".

#Notice there is no ":" after "h". The leading ":" suppresses error messages from

#getopts. This is required to get my unrecognized option code to work.

while getopts :f:ch FLAG; do

case $FLAG in

f) #set option for custom file

TABFILE=$OPTARG

;;

c) #set option for current window

NEWWINDOW=0

;;

h) #show help

HELP

;;

\?) #unrecognized option - show help

echo -e \\n"Option $OPTARG not allowed."

HELP

;;

esac

done

shift $((OPTIND-1)) #This tells getopts to move on to the next argument.

#Call Chrome by itself. This will create a new window instead of hijacking the existing one.

if [ $NEWWINDOW -eq 1 ]; then

/Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome

### Actually Open The Tabs ###

while read line; do open -a /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome $1$line$2; done < $TABFILE

Place it somewhere in your default path. If you don’t know what that means, just put it at /usr/local/bin/tabit

Make it executable:

chmod +x /usr/local/bin/tabit

1	chmod +x /usr/local/bin/tabit

By default, Tabit looks for a file in your user’s home directory called ‘.tabit’. Paste the list of Youtube IDs into that file. If you are on a Mac and just copied the list above, the following will do the trick:

pbpaste > ~/.tabit

1	pbpaste > ~/.tabit

All that is left to do now is run the script. Using the defaults, the syntax is really simple: Just run

tabit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=

1	tabit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=

I added a few options like the ability to specify a file instead of the default ~/.tabit and also the option to have the tabs open in your current Chrome window. Lastly, if you happen to have a URL where the variable is NOT the last part of the URL, you can add on a suffix. You get the following help documentation if you run tabit with no arguments:

Help documentation for tabit

Basic usage: tabit [options] <start of URL with trailing slash> [Remainder of URL with leading slash]

Options:
-f <path to file>. — File to read variables from. Default is ~/.tabit
-c — Use Current Window.

That’s it! After you get used to using this, you will find that it is much easier to just paste the variables into ~/.tabit and run the script instead of manually opening a bunch of tabs.

Keyboard Shortcuts

When working with dozens (to hundreds) of tabs, don’t forget these shortcuts

Shortcut Keys	Action
Cmd+Shift+{	Go to Left Tab
Cmd+Shift+}	Go to Right Tab
Cmd+w	Close Tab
Cmd+Shift+T	Re-Open Most Recently Closed Tab
Click a tab + Shift + Click a different tab	Select Range of Tabs (Cmd+w will close all selected tabs)

Gotchas

The script assumes a standard installation of Google Chrome. If you installed it somewhere else, you will need to edit lines 58 and 62 with the correct path to Chrome on your system.