Auto-load last open trees when starting Chrome

[jonnyasmar]

TabFern is amazing, but one of my biggest gripes with it is that any time I reopen Chrome, TabFern is set to a new "Unsaved" tree. This requires an extra step from me every time to close the current window and reopen the last tree that I was using to ensure my tabs are saved to the correct tree.

If TabFern could close the initially opened "Unsaved" tree/window and instead auto-open the trees that I last had open, that would remove that step and the mental overhead of having to remember to open the correct tree every time I open Chrome.

Is this possible? I'm a JS developer with a tiny bit of Chrome extension experience and would be happy to dig in to this with some guidance/code-pointers.

[cxw42]

It is certainly possible, and thanks for being willing to take it on! The "Unsaved" is the default browser window opened by Chrome. I think step 1 would be to also open the window of interest, and then after that close the "Unsaved" window.

The first step is to get set up to build and load unpacked --- instructions are at https://github.com/cxw42/TabFern/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md#getting-started . Please let me know if you run into trouble with the instructions, as they certainly don't cover every situation :) . (In particular, I haven't tried setting up on latest nodejs recently)

After that, I think the next place to go would be

TabFern/app/win/main_tl.js

Lines 4657 to 4659 in 07ead26

	})
	.or((err) => {

. At line 4658, just before the .or, add a .val(openLastTree) (and change the .or to s.or). Around line 4540, define new openLastTree(). (TabFern predates wide availability of promises, so uses https://github.com/getify/asynquence for async operations instead.)

openLastTree() itself will use functions from https://github.com/cxw42/TabFern/blob/main/app/win/model.js , which is called M in main_tl.js. I'd like to discuss as you get towards that point what would be the most elegant API (with the caveat that model.js itself is kind of ugly, but better than what I had before).

Tests are Jasmine, in t/spec.

How does that strike you?

[cxw42]

(And, by the way, I am definitely open to suggestions for improving the code organization, simpler bundling, or other quality-of-life improvements. My restrictions are that I want to keep it in JS (not TS) and I want the main functions to be at the top level (not in a module) for easier debugging in the Developer Console. If you have any suggestions from your experience, let me know!)