An 8-bit pixel, keyboard-first workspace tab manager for Chrome. Pin one tab, run everything from there — without ever reaching for the mouse.
The flagship move —
Shift+Enteron a workspace stashes everything you don't need and pops the new tabs into a colour-coded Chrome group:
If you live in Chrome and any of these sound familiar, this is for you:
| Pain | Tabstation's fix |
|---|---|
| ⌨️ I hate reaching for the mouse | Keyboard-first — every action has a single-key shortcut. Vim-style hjkl or arrow keys; modals support Tab / Enter / Esc properly. You can literally never touch the mouse. |
| 😩 30+ tabs and I can't find anything | Live tab list with three views (by window / by site / by recency), full-page search |
🤦 Accidentally closed a tab and Cmd+Shift+T only goes back one |
RECENTLY CLOSED section — one click to restore any of the last 15 tabs/windows |
| 🔁 Switching between projects means opening the same 8 tabs every time | Workspaces: save a group of URLs once, press Enter to open them all as a colour-coded Chrome tab group |
| 🧹 Done with a project — close those tabs but keep the unrelated ones | Shift+Enter switches workspaces: stash the old tabs (recoverable) and open the new ones |
| 🪲 17 Notion tabs, want them all gone | BY SITE × ALL — close every tab from a domain in one click |
| 🌪️ Stray tabs that aren't part of any project pile up | 🗑️ Orphan cleanup — top-bar button closes everything not in any workspace |
- Save groups of URLs by topic (BQ Research, Offer Calc, Morning Routine…)
- Each workspace has an emoji + colour that maps to a Chrome tab-group colour
- Press
Enterto open them all; existing tabs are reused (no dupes) Shift+Enterto switch — closes everything else first- Inline expand to see the URLs without opening them
- Three views: BY WINDOW / BY SITE / RECENT — toggle with
vorTab - Duplicate URLs collapse into a group with
×Nclose-all - Each domain in BY SITE has
× ALLto nuke all tabs from that site - Each window in BY WINDOW has
× ALLto close that window's tabs
- Last 15 closed tabs and windows live at the bottom of the right panel
- Click or
Enterto restore - Closed windows restore as full windows with all their tabs
- Light mode: SMB1 sky blue
- Dark mode: night desert — purple sky with stars, moon, cacti silhouettes on the horizon
- 🌗 Auto mode follows your macOS Display setting (light by day, dark by night)
- Coin sound when you add a tab, 1-UP on new workspace, pipe-slide on open, etc.
- Toggle with the 🔊 button (purely synthesised — no audio files)
- Click the TABSTAT?ON logo 5 times in a row, or type the Konami code (
↑↑↓↓←→←→BA) - Plays Yoshi's Apple Garden — catch 🍎 apples, avoid 💣 bombs, ⭐ stars give big points. High score saved.
Send your coding agent (Claude Code, Codex, etc.) this repo URL and say "install this":
https://github.com/dora-dotcom/tabstation
The agent will introduce you to Tabstation, walk you through loading the extension, and show you the keyboard shortcuts. Takes about 1 minute. See AGENTS.md for the script it follows.
Tabstation isn't on the Chrome Web Store (yet). For now:
git clone https://github.com/dora-dotcom/tabstation.git🪶 The repo includes a handful of demo GIFs (~120 MB) for the README. Want just the code? Add
--filter=blob:limit=2mto skip the big assets:git clone --filter=blob:limit=2m https://github.com/dora-dotcom/tabstation.git
Then in Chrome:
- Open
chrome://extensions/ - Toggle Developer mode (top right)
- Click Load unpacked
- Select the
tabstationfolder - A pinned tab opens — that's your home base. Right-click the toolbar icon → Pin to keep it handy.
Ctrl+W(Mac) — global hotkey to jump to the Tabstation tab from anywhereCmd+1— since the tab is pinned first, this also works- Click the toolbar icon
Rebind the hotkey at chrome://extensions/shortcuts.
A pinned Tabstation tab opens automatically. The first time it loads, a small wizard appears:
Found N bookmark folder(s). Pick which to import as workspaces.
Tabstation scans your Chrome bookmark folders and offers to turn each one into a workspace (the folder's URLs become the workspace's URLs, and each gets a random Mario emoji + colour). It's the fastest way to get started if you already organise tabs as bookmarks.
- Use ↑↓ + Space to pick a folder, Tab to the IMPORT button, Enter to confirm.
- Don't want any of them? Just press Esc (or click CANCEL) — nothing is imported and the wizard never bothers you again.
- After import you can rename / re-emoji / recolor any workspace with
r(or right-click → edit).
If you have zero bookmark folders, the wizard skips silently and you start with an empty WORLD 1-1 — press n (or click + NEW) to create your first workspace.
All of these have a button in the top bar or a chrome://extensions/shortcuts entry:
| Default | What it means | Where to change |
|---|---|---|
| 🌗 Theme: Auto | Follows your macOS Display setting (light by day, dark by night) | Click the 🌗 / 🌙 / ☀️ button to cycle |
| 🔊 Sound: On | Web-audio synth beeps on actions | Click the 🔊 button to mute |
| 🪟 Tab view: BY WINDOW | Right panel groups tabs per Chrome window | Click BY WINDOW / BY SITE / RECENT, or press v |
⌨️ Hotkey: Ctrl+W (Mac) |
Jumps to Tabstation from anywhere in Chrome | chrome://extensions/shortcuts |
Press ? any time to see the full keyboard cheatsheet inside the app.
Open the in-app ? help anytime. The essentials:
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
↑ ↓ (or j k) |
Move selection up/down |
← → (or h l) |
Switch panel (workspaces ↔ tabs) |
Enter |
Open workspace / Jump to tab / Restore recently-closed |
⇧Enter |
Switch to workspace (close other tabs first) |
1 – 9 |
Quick-open Nth visible workspace |
n / r / d (or ⌫) |
New / Rename / Delete workspace |
a |
Add the selected tab to a workspace |
x (or ⌫) |
Close selected tab (or all duplicates of a collapsed group) |
/ |
Focus workspace search |
v (or Tab) |
Cycle BY WINDOW / BY SITE / RECENT |
Esc |
Close any modal / clear search |
? |
Show full help |
A few things that aren't accidents:
- Pinned single-tab UX: Tabstation lives in one Chrome tab. No new windows, no popup that closes when you click away. It's a workspace, not a sidebar.
- 8-bit aesthetic: Press Start 2P + Pixelify Sans, NES-inspired palette, hard-edge borders, no rounded corners. The night mode has a starry sky with cacti silhouettes; the title's
?block is the actual letter "I" inTABSTAT?ON. - Keyboard-first: every action is reachable without the mouse, including modals (focus trap, arrow-key nav inside grids, single-key shortcuts).
- No build step: pure vanilla JS, HTML, CSS. Hack it with any editor, reload the extension, done.
- Local-only: workspaces persist via
chrome.storage.local. Nothing is synced or sent anywhere. - Safety net for batch actions: every close uses
chrome.tabs.remove, so closed tabs land in Chrome's session history and show up in RECENTLY CLOSED for one-click restore.
Vanilla HTML / CSS / JS. No build step, no framework, no TypeScript. Section headers (// ===) in tabstation.js mark the major subsystems; non-obvious gotchas (Mac shortcut quirk, favicon permission, theme selector form, focus-trap filter, MV3 service-worker lifetime) live as inline comments at their site. File tree:
manifest.json ← Chrome extension manifest (MV3)
background.js ← Service worker: global hotkey + open-Tabstation logic
assets/ ← Extension icons (16/48/128) + Python build script
src/
tabstation.html ← Single-page UI
tabstation.css ← All styles, including light/dark themes
tabstation.js ← All logic — state, rendering, keyboard, easter egg game
To iterate: change a file → chrome://extensions/ reload (if manifest.json changed) → Cmd+R the Tabstation tab.
MIT — see LICENSE.
- Press Start 2P and Pixelify Sans — Google Fonts, OFL licensed
- Visual inspiration: Super Mario Bros. 1 & 3 (Nintendo). Nothing is copied directly; the cacti, ? block, and palette are originals in the SMB tradition.
- Built collaboratively with Claude Code 🤖