Tabulary
User guide / v1.1.0 / Chrome · Edge
The guide to everything Tabulary does.
Tabulary saves the tabs you are not finished with into boards and collections kept on your own machine. This document covers every feature: what it does, where to find it, what it stores, and how to turn it off.
Written against version 1.1.0. Check yours in Settings → About; if you are on 1.0.x, the Desk, Sessions, Review, Live Collections, duplicates and web search are not in your build yet.
01 — Getting started
Install and first run
Tabulary is a Manifest V3 extension for Chrome and Edge. It replaces your new tab page with your library and adds a button to the browser toolbar. Firefox is not supported yet.
Installing
-
Install the extension from your browser's store, or load a built copy.
To load a build yourself: open
chrome://extensionsoredge://extensions, turn on Developer mode, choose Load unpacked, and select thedistfolder. -
Tabulary opens its own tab the first time it is installed.
That page is the library. It is also what every new tab will open on from now on.
-
Pin the toolbar button if your browser hid it behind the puzzle-piece menu.
The button is how you save the page you are currently reading without leaving it.
The welcome screen
On first run Tabulary explains the Board → Collection → Tab model and asks two things: which optional features you want switched on, and how you would like to start.
You never need an account. A local-only library is a first-class way to use Tabulary, not a trial mode — every feature except cross-device backup works signed out.
02 — The model
How a library is organised
There are three levels and only three. Every other feature — sessions, rules, the desk, the review queue — is a different way of getting at these.
What Tabulary stores about a page
A saved tab is a reference, not an archive. Tabulary reads a tab's title and URL at the moment you ask it to save that tab, and it keeps the favicon address so the row is recognisable. It does not read page contents, does not take snapshots, and does not watch pages you have not asked it to save.
↑ Contents03 — Surfaces
Where Tabulary appears
Four places, each doing a different job.
Your boards, collections, the Desk, Sessions, Review and Live Collections. Reachable any time by opening a new tab, or from Open Tabulary in the popup.
Quick Save for the tab you are on and Quick Access for finding a saved one. Opens with the toolbar button or Alt + Shift + T.
Type tt then a space and your browser's address bar searches your saved links directly. Results show the board and collection each one is in.
Inside the workspace
Both sidebars can open temporarily when you hover over them while collapsed, without shifting the page. Turn each side on independently in Settings → Personalize → Collapsed sidebar previews.
04 — Capture
Saving tabs
Seven routes in, chosen by what you have in front of you: one tab, one window, or a tab you can see in a list.
Quick Save — the tab you are on
Click the toolbar button. The popup previews the active tab and the destination it will use, which is the board and collection you last saved to successfully.
Open the popup. It shows the page title, the site, and Saving to with your current destination.
Press Save, or press Change to pick a different board and collection — including creating a new collection on the spot.
Wherever you saved becomes the destination for next time. Tabulary never moves already-saved tabs when the destination changes.
Saving the same URL to the same collection twice does not create a second row. The popup also tells you how many copies of that page already exist elsewhere in your library.
Save for review — keep it now, decide later
In the popup, Save for review stores the tab in a normal collection and marks it pending. It appears in the Review queue until you file or resolve it. See section 09.
Save this window
From the popup, Save this window switches to the window-saving panel: choose an existing collection or name a new one, and optionally tick Close these tabs after saving. The same panel is available inside the workspace as Save open tabs.
Drag a live tab
Add a tab by hand
Every collection has an Add a tab action for a link you are typing in rather than one you have open.
Auto-sort
If you use Live Collections with file rules, saving offers an Auto-sort destination that routes each tab through your rules instead of into one fixed collection. For a whole window, Tabulary shows where every tab will land before it saves anything. See section 10.
Every normal save route skips a URL that is already in the destination collection. Matching is done on the same canonical form the duplicate scanner uses, so saving one article from a newsletter link and again from the address bar does not produce two rows.
05 — Organisation
Organising your library
Boards
Collections
Working with several collections at once
Press Select collections in the board toolbar to enter selection mode.
Select with the checkbox, or by clicking the unused area of a collection header. Selected collections are highlighted.
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Move, copy, or delete the selection.
A move keeps collections and their contents together. A copy creates new collections and new tabs, so editing one afterwards does not change the other.
Press Done selecting to leave the mode.
Saved tabs
Tags
Tags are a single palette shared across the whole library, and they can be applied to both collections and individual saved tabs. Create, rename, recolour and delete them in Settings → Tags. Before a tag is deleted, Tabulary shows how many collections and tabs use it; deleting removes that assignment everywhere and strips the tag from any Live Collection rule that referenced it.
Layouts
| Level | Options | Set where |
|---|---|---|
| Collections on a board | Stack (a vertical list) or Shelf (a two-column flow) | Board toolbar, per board |
| Saved tabs in a collection | Cards, Rows, or Gallery | Board toolbar, per board |
| Defaults for new boards | Both of the above | Settings → Personalize → Library layout |
A board that has not chosen its own layout follows the defaults, so changing a default updates every board that never overrode it.
↑ Contents06 — Retrieval
Finding things again
tt, then a space, then your query. The suggestions come from your own saved links and never leave the device. Requires Quick Access to be enabled.Choosing the toolbar's starting view
The popup can open on Quick Save or on Quick Access. Set the default in Settings → Features → Quick Access; whichever you choose, one click switches to the other.
↑ Contents07 — The Desk
A workspace you arrange yourself
The Desk sits beside your boards and holds widgets rather than collections. Its defining rule: nothing reflows. A widget you put in a corner stays in that corner, and empty space stays empty, because the arrangement is the index you built — a layout that rearranges itself destroys it.
Placement snaps to a 12-column grid rather than raw pixels, so an arrangement survives a window resize. Below about 720 pixels wide the surface renders as a single readable column without changing anything you saved.
Using it
Open Desk from the sidebar. A first-time desk arrives already arranged rather than empty; a desk you deliberately clear is never re-seeded.
Press Add widget and pick a kind. It lands in the first sensible gap.
Drag a widget by its handle to move it, and drag the corner to resize. Neighbours move aside as you drag, and what you see before releasing is exactly what gets saved.
Drag a live browser tab onto empty space to leave a link tile there, or onto a collection tile to file it into that collection.
Remove a widget with the × on its header. Removing a tile never deletes what it points at.
Widgets
| Widget | What it does |
|---|---|
| Pick up where you left off | Answers "what was I doing?" with your most recent session or the collection you last saved into, restorable in one action. |
| Collection | A living tile bound to one collection, showing what is actually inside it and updating as the library changes. Also a drop target that files without duplicating. |
| Stash this window | Saves every tab in the current window as a named session and closes them, in one confirmed step. |
| Open right now | The tabs in this window, ready to drag onto a collection. |
| Recently saved | The last things you put away, newest first. |
| Review queue | Tabs you deferred, with file and resolve actions in place. |
| Live Collection | A rule-defined lens over the whole library, always current. |
| Search | Search the web, or your own saved library. |
| Note | A scratch note that stays on the desk. |
| Tasks | A short checklist. |
| Shortcuts | A speed dial of sites you open constantly. |
| Clock | The time, the date, and a greeting. The date and greeting drop away as you make it shorter. |
| Link | A single saved link sitting where you dropped it. Created only by dragging a live tab onto empty space. |
Several desks
The strip along the bottom holds your desks. Click one to switch, double-click to rename, + to make another, and × to delete. Separate desks are how one surface holds several contexts — Work, Personal, Research — without their widgets colliding.
Quick launch
Press Ctrl/⌘ + K, or just /, anywhere on the Desk. A spotlight-style launcher opens over the surface: switch desks, make a new one, add any widget, tidy, open Settings, jump to Sessions, Review or Live Collections, or jump straight to any collection in your library. Arrow keys move, Enter runs, Esc closes. The bare / exists because some browsers claim Ctrl+K on a new tab page.
Tidy
The one place the Desk is allowed to close a gap, and it only runs when you ask for it by name. Tidy packs widgets into bands that share a top edge, keeping your reading order and every widget's height. An Undo appears in the taskbar for about fifteen seconds afterwards, then expires rather than sitting there offering to put back an arrangement you have already moved on from.
Look and behaviour
Widgets and their placement are private data like everything else: they ride Google Drive backup, JSON export and import, and device migration. On export, placement travels literally but references to a collection or rule are written by name, since internal ids do not survive a round-trip. A widget whose reference cannot be resolved on import is dropped rather than imported broken.
08 — Sessions
Named snapshots of browser work
A session is a deliberate, point-in-time snapshot. It is not a collection: a collection is a living place you keep links, while a session freezes what was open at one moment and never changes when you rearrange the library later.
Capturing
Press Save session in the workspace toolbar.
Choose the scope: This window, All windows, or an individually ticked subset of tabs.
Name it and confirm. The capture keeps each tab's order and which window it came from.
The Stash this window desk widget does the same in one click, and closes the window's tabs afterwards.
Smart Restore
Nothing opens or closes until you confirm. Before restoring, Tabulary compares the session against what is already open and explains anything duplicate or invalid.
Managing
From the Sessions view you can rename a session, restore it, or delete it. Sessions are included in Google Drive backup, JSON export and import, and device migration.
Settings
In Settings → Features → Sessions: the master switch, the default capture scope, the default restore mode and destination, and Remember choices — off by default — which starts each dialog from your last confirmed options instead of the defaults. The Sessions view carries a compact copy of that switch. Turning Sessions off hides the sidebar entry and the save action but never deletes a snapshot.
↑ Contents09 — Review
A queue for tabs you have not decided about
Review is for a page worth keeping when you do not yet know where it belongs. A pending tab is a completely normal saved tab living in a real collection, with a small pending marker — it is never in limbo, and it is never at risk of disappearing.
Press Save for review in the toolbar popup instead of a plain save.
Open Review from the sidebar. It can carry a count of how many tabs are waiting, or stay quiet — your choice.
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Work through the queue.
File here moves the tab to the destination you chose at the top and clears its pending state. Keep in current collection clears the pending state and leaves the tab where it is. Delete removes it.
Turning Review off hides its actions and workspace; pending tabs and their state stay exactly as they are, and pending state travels in backup, export and migration as part of each normal saved tab.
↑ Contents10 — Live Collections
Rules that gather, without moving anything
A Live Collection is a rule, not a folder. Membership is recomputed every time the view is shown and never stored, so it cannot go stale — and deleting a rule deletes a rule, never a link. Off by default.
The two kinds of rule
Conditions
| Condition | Operators | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Domain | is / ends with | "Ends with" matches subdomains, so github.com also catches gist.github.com. The default for new conditions is set in Settings. |
| URL | contains / regex | A malformed regular expression is handled rather than thrown. |
| Title | contains | Case sensitivity is a setting, off by default. |
| Tag | is | Deleting a tag strips it from every rule that used it. |
Combine conditions with any or all logic. A rule can be scoped to one board or scan every board, can include or exclude pending-review tabs, and can be sorted by most recent, title, or site.
Managing rules
The rules manager opens from the Live Collections view or from Settings → Features → Live Collections. Tabulary also mines domain → collection suggestions from your existing saves so a first rule is one click rather than a blank form.
Auto-sort
With Auto-sort on save enabled, saving offers an Auto-sort destination that runs each tab through your file rules. Preview before auto-filing a window shows exactly where a whole window's tabs will land before anything is saved. Both are separate switches, so you can have view rules without any automatic filing.
Sidebar
Optional live counts beside each view, and an option to hide views that currently match nothing. Turning Live Collections off hides every surface but keeps your rules; they ride backup, export and import, and migration, with tag, board and target references serialized by name.
↑ Contents11 — Duplicates
Finding pages saved more than once
Find duplicates in the board toolbar groups saved tabs by a canonical form of their URL rather than by exact string equality.
www., letter case, a trailing slash, the fragment, and query-parameter order. Campaign parameters — utm_*, fbclid, gclid, si, ref and kin — are stripped.?v=, ?q= and ?id= routinely select a different page. A false match here would cost you a tab you agreed to delete.12 — Web search
Searching the web from the workspace
The search box in the workspace toolbar sends a query to a search engine, or opens it directly if what you typed is a URL, a bare domain, or a local address. Ctrl/⌘ + K focuses it.
Built-in engines
Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing, Brave, Perplexity, Wikipedia, GitHub, Ecosia, and Kagi.
Custom engines
Add your own with a %s where the query belongs — for example https://example.com/search?q=%s. A custom engine can carry its own short hint and icon.
Controls
All of these live in Settings → Personalize → Web Search.
↑ Contents13 — Appearance
Themes, layout defaults, and motion
Colour
Six palettes — Reading Room (warm paper), Slate (cool blue-grey), Sage (muted green), Ink (graphite neutral), Rosewood (dusty rose), and Marine (deep teal and navy). The background atmosphere and the main action colour are chosen separately, so you can pair any background with any accent; new installs start on the calm Ink-and-Rust combination this website wears. Colour mode is light, dark, or follow the device.
Other Personalize controls
Motion
Settings → Motion holds every animation preference in one place.
Your device's Reduce Motion preference always takes priority and skips travel effects, whatever these settings say.
14 — Data
Account, backup and sync
Tabulary is local-first. Everything you save goes into IndexedDB in your own browser and works fully offline. An account is only ever about identity and backup.
Signing in
Backup to your own Drive
Backup writes to appDataFolder, a hidden folder in your own Google Drive that belongs to the extension. It is not a shared Tabulary database. The permission requested is drive.appdata, which cannot see your files, photos or documents, and you can revoke it or delete that folder at any time.
Sync covers boards, collections, tabs, tags, sessions, Live Collection rules, desk widgets, settings and profile data, with pull/push status and a manual Sync now.
The extension stores only a short-lived Drive access token. Google refresh tokens and the OAuth client secret never ship inside the extension — they live in a separately deployed token broker that never receives your boards, collections, tabs, or browsing data. It only returns a short-lived access token when a sync needs one.
Separate data spaces
Local-only data and each signed-in account use separate local databases, so one identity's tabs can never appear in another's. Nothing moves between them on its own.
The full detail of every permission and why it is requested is in the privacy policy.
↑ Contents15 — Portability
Import and export
Every import route is parse, then preview, then commit. Nothing touches your library until you confirm a specific selection.
Importing
Open Settings → Import, or press Import in the workspace toolbar.
Choose Import browser bookmarks or Import JSON file…
In the preview, deselect any collection you do not want and reorder the incoming boards.
Press Import selected. Tabulary reports how many tabs and sessions arrived.
Exporting
Settings → Export shows your whole library as a tree with everything selected. Narrow it if you want, then export. The result is one JSON file holding boards, collections, tabs, tags, sessions, Live Collection rules, and desk widgets.
The destructive flows — clearing data, deleting an account — offer an export first.
↑ Contents16 — Reference
Settings, area by area
Settings opens from the sidebar. The rail is grouped into Your space, Workspace, and Data & backup, with About and Support at the bottom. Esc closes it.
| Area | Group | What is in it |
|---|---|---|
| Profile | Your space | Display name, profile photo, sign-in methods, linking Google or a password, changing a password, connecting Google for backup, sync status, sign out. |
| Personalize | Your space | After-saving behaviour, theme background and accent, colour mode, default layouts, new-collection placement, icon visibility, saved-tab opening behaviour, keep-one-new-tab, sidebar hover previews, and all Web Search controls. |
| Motion | Your space | Animation master switch, speed, save-destination feedback and its two per-route switches, sidebar preview animation. |
| Features | Workspace | One card each for Quick Save, Quick Access, Review, Sessions, Desk, and Live Collections — an on/off switch, a guide, and that feature's full settings inside. |
| Tags | Workspace | Create, rename, recolour and delete tags, with a usage count shown before any deletion. |
| Performance | Data & backup | On-demand diagnostics for the visible page. See section 18. |
| Data | Data & backup | Local and account data counts, copying in either direction, and the danger zone: clear device data, clear account data, delete account. |
| Import | Data & backup | Browser bookmarks, Tabulary JSON, Toby JSON, with preview and selection. |
| Export | Data & backup | Selective JSON export of boards and collections, sessions included. |
| About | — | The installed version and a short in-app changelog. |
| Support | — | GitHub Sponsors, Ko-fi, PayPal, and the feedback form. |
How feature switches behave
Every optional capability has a master on/off switch, and the rule is the same for all of them: turning a feature off hides its entry points without deleting anything. Sessions stay saved, pending review tabs stay pending, rules stay defined, the desk arrangement is preserved. Turn it back on and everything is where you left it.
Core safety, privacy, storage and navigation behaviour are not optional modules and deliberately have no disable switch. Every preference is stored in Tabulary's private synced settings record, so it survives reloads and is included in backup, export, migration and account sync.
↑ Contents17 — Keys
Keyboard reference
| Key | Where | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Alt + Shift + T | Anywhere in the browser | Opens the Tabulary toolbar popup. Rebindable at your browser's extension-shortcuts page. |
| tt then Space | Address bar | Searches your saved links without opening anything. Requires Quick Access. |
| Ctrl + Shift + K ⌘⇧K | Tabulary workspace | Opens library search. |
| Ctrl + K / ⌘K | Tabulary workspace | Focuses the web search box, when web search is enabled. |
| Ctrl + K / ⌘K or / | The Desk | Opens Quick launch. The bare slash works even where the browser claims the combo. |
| ↑ ↓ | Quick Access, Quick launch | Moves through results. |
| Enter | Quick Access, Quick launch | Opens the highlighted result, or runs the command. |
| Ctrl + Enter | Quick Access | Opens the highlighted result in a new tab. |
| Ctrl + K / ⌘K | Quick Access | Refocuses and selects the search field. |
| Esc | Everywhere | Closes the current dialog, panel, search, or popup. |
| Double-click | Collection name, desk tab | Renames it in place. |
| Shift-click | Review select mode | Selects a range. |
18 — Diagnostics
Performance
Settings → Performance is an on-demand, visible-only diagnostics view. It reports only what the browser itself provides for the Tabulary page you are looking at: JavaScript heap where the browser exposes it, extension storage use, and long-task responsiveness. CPU is intentionally never estimated. You can switch between a live reading and a 60-second average, and refresh explicitly.
- Sampling happens only while that page is open and visible. Closing or hiding it stops immediately.
- There are no alarms and no continuous background monitor. Opening this page is the only time diagnostics run.
- Measurements are transient and stay on the device. They are never stored, synced, exported, or sent anywhere.
- Tabulary's background work is a Manifest V3 service worker: the browser wakes it for extension events and puts it to sleep when the work ends.
19 — Help
Troubleshooting and getting in touch
Getting in touch
Suggestions, problems, questions and kind words are all welcome through the feedback form. Tabulary is free and independent; if it earns a place in your day, GitHub Sponsors and Ko-fi are how it stays that way.
↑ Contents