Making These "Tab Group" Functions a Reality in the New Safari?

Safari on macOS 12.0.1 Monterey...

I found myself surprisingly liking the tab group function, especially since I can continue working on "topical" groups (eg tech, medical, etc) on different devices (including mobile!). These are 3 things I would want:

  1. Keyboard shortcut to move to the "main" tabs (the set of tabs at the top which are NOT in a group).

  2. Option to have links opened from other apps to open in the "main" tabs. Then I don't get a group that happens to be open "contaminated" with tabs that I happen to open from, say, an email. Also, when links from outside applications are opened in whatever tab group happens to have the focus in the browser, they tend to get "lost"...this leads me to the final item:

  3. Ability to search across all tabs including tab groups! It's infuriating to know I have a tab open and be unable to find it! :rage:

Open to any ideas on accomplishing this with scripting, etc...

Thanks for any thoughts!

Hey Aaron,

It'll be awhile, before I have Monterey available for testing.

See if this old script works for the new Safari and sees the tab group tabs:

Activate Safari/Chrome and Select an Existing Tab vs Creating a New Tab - #3 by ccstone

I've been using variations of this since 1996.

-Chris

I totally agree @ajg23 that Safari desperately needs keyboard shortcuts for groups. I spent a bunch of time trying to automate tab group management but ended up scrapping it because it was too unreliable and difficult to manage all the use cases. Your wish #2 would be super helpful. One thing I wish is a reset function for a tab group to make all tabs reload to a fixed starting point, Sometimes it is nice to open a tab group and pick up where you left off and other times I want to start from a known starting point.

What I ended up doing does not use tab groups but simply create bookmark folders for each of my "groups". Then create a macro (Safari only) with a keyboard shortcut that selects the menu item to opens all the bookmarks in a single window.

Then when I have say three windows open each with multiple tabs for each function, I use a macro that is triggered with ^[tab] that execute the following to cycle through the Safari windows,

This is working for me fairly well now that I have muscle memory for the shortcuts.

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Just a followup to my previous post.

I thought I'd post the macros that I have been using to make Safari tab groups work better by defining a hotkey to select tab groups and another hot key to reset a tab group. I've been using these for awhile now and it has been working well for me.

Here is what I did:

  1. I created several bookmark folders that contain bookmarks for News, Tech, etc.

  2. Then I created a KBM group called Safari Group that contains macros that execute a macro called Select Tab Group (with parameter) where the parameter is which tab group I want to invoke. For example I use opt-cmd-n to select the News tab group.

  3. One of the problems I had with the Safari tab group implementation is that there is not a reset function that would reset all the tabs to the starting point. Often as I am using Safari, new tabs would get added to the group or tabs would veer off from the initial website. The addition of the control key to the hotkey you use to invoke the tab group resets the tab group to where you started. In my example ctrl-opt-cmd-n would reset the News tab group.

So opt-cmd-(hot key) selects the tab group via the Tab Group Picker and ctrl-opt-cmd-(hot key) resets the tab group using the Bookmarks-->(bookmarks folder)-->Replace Tabs feature.

Example News tab group macro.

Here is the Select Tab Group macro.

Here are my Safari Tab Group macros.
Download ⇢ Safari Group Macros.kmmacros (15.8 KB)

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