[9 Nov 2020] Coming soon: Stash windows

What do you do when you have too many windows, but you're not ready to ditch any of them? Perhaps, for windows you're not going to revisit for some time, you'd be willing to store the tabs as bookmarks?

Stash is a new upcoming feature currently in development: a single no-fuss command that streamlines the multistep process of saving a window's tabs as bookmarks, into a newly-created folder you'd be manually naming, and then closing the window. It would come with its counterpart "unstash" that reverses the process just as smoothly.

I've received feedback from Winger users requesting some new capabilities; in particular, "hiding" windows and "grouping" windows. I think stashing can meet these needs.

I consider stashing windows to be a monumentally important addition to Winger's repertoire. Probably. Been dreaming it up for a long time, over how it would work, how it would fit within Winger, and what new possibilities could open up. Besides decluttering your workspace and your Winger panel, yes, it might actually allow for a makeshift window-grouping system.

A roadmap, kind of

In this two-small-kids no-daycares-open stay-at-home-dad pandemic life, development will take time. But since I want to ship stashing as soon as possible (lord knows I have half a dozen windows I'd like to stash), I intend to build and release this – rather grand vision of a super-feature – progressively in chunks. In no particular order, over an indeterminate period of time, Winger 1.4x updates will likely include:

• Stash buttons in the panel
• List and filter stashed-windows in the panel, plus unstash buttons
• Unstash window command in the bookmark context menu
• Stash tab(s) command in the bookmark context menu
• Preserve some tab state like pinned, reader view, parent-child relationships, etc.
• Nested stashed-windows: Window groups
• Settings and customisations

Be warned though, some of these new changes might be tentative, experimental and impermanent.

Thanks for your patience.

Other extensions

There are many browser extensions that provide this type of functionality, implemented in various ways, also often called "saving" windows/tabs.

There was a moment when I thought: maybe I should just point people to these other extensions which can already do the job well, and avoid bloating Winger. But I realised the convenience of skipping an entire step of meaningfully naming a saved window – because you've already named it, right? – is too useful to pass up. So here we are. I'll give us what we all want.